Making a Melted Crayon Picture with a Glue Gun


I'm sure you've all seen those pictures on Pinterest of the cute couple under the umbrella in silhouette with rainbow rain falling around them. They claim you can do it with crayons and a blow dryer. Well, either my blow dryer isn't very warm or I don't have enough patience (probably both), because I was never able to get that trick to work for me. So here's how you do it with a hot glue gun instead.

First step: Get a hot glue gun that you don't care about. Because you are unlikely to be able to use this glue gun for much other than crayons after this. I bought this mini glue gun at Walmart for less than $5 years ago, and I figured I could handle retiring it from producing hot glue to producing hot colored wax.



Next, you'll need a mirror or canvas, something to put this on. I used a cheap Dollar Tree mirror, but you could use whatever you'd like.



Now you need a silhouette. I used an image rendered onto adhesive vinyl with my Cricut machine. You could cut something out by hand with scissors and/or an X-Acto knife. (Did you know that's a brand name? I didn't until I wrote this post. You experienced crafters and artists can stop laughing at me now.)



If your image is adhesive vinyl, applying it is super simple. If it's regular construction paper, you can apply it with a glue stick, but you have to be careful. You don't want to get glue smudges all over the mirror.



Now, pick the colors of crayons you want and lay them out in the order you want. I used a rainbow set, but I've seen people use only different shades of blue or yellow. Just pick according to your taste and current home decor.


Remove all the paper from your crayons. This would also be a good time to heat up your glue gun.


Load the first crayon into your glue gun. Push the crayon through until colored wax comes out instead of the glue that had already been in there. The wax will come out a lot faster and easier than the glue, so be careful.


Prop your mirror up against the wall at an angle so your drops don't run so quickly to the bottom. Apply the wax to the top corner of your mirror, going slowly. You will have to guide the drips with your glue gun tip because they will naturally run into one long, fat drip, which does not look good. To get some more texture, let the drops dry before applying another drip over it.


Continue with this until you get close to the umbrella. At this point, you'll need to take much more care with your drips. You can hold a scrap of paper over the umbrella perpendicular to the mirror so that no drips run over the silhouette. You can tell in the picture that I didn't take such precautions, but that's why yours will look better than mine.


When you've finished applying all of your wax, go back and touch up the edges, removing any wax that got onto the frame or onto your silhouette image.


And now you're done! Enjoy your Pinterest-worthy project.



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