Color Art Blown Away

These color drip art pieces have been showing up on the internet. I thought our kids at co-op would enjoy making them if I could figure out how to do it well in a group environment. First my girls and I tried a couple at home to figure out the best way to go about it. M. made the orange-y one and I made the blue one above.

I ran a strip of masking tape sticky-side-up across the top of the 10 x 14" canvas boards (under $1 each at Enesco.com) and attached them at the back by folding a small edge of the tape upon itself. With the masking tape the kids could arrange (and rearrange if necessary,) their individual colors. The tape also made it possible for us to easily break this project up into two weeks if necessary without a lot of crayons "floating around" and getting mixed up.

Before I turned the kids loose to choose their colors, we looked at the examples and talked about ideas for choosing and arranging colors (warm/cool colors, rainbow, patterns, Fall or Spring colors, etc.) We also went over the procedure for glueing (adult only) and blow dry melting (kids with supervision.) I had another drawing project set up and introduced that for students to work on when they had waiting time for the hot glue and blow dry stations.
When it was time to hot glue the colors onto the board, I ripped the ends off of the masking tape that was attaching the crayons to the board and slid the line of crayons down. Hot glue was applied above them and then the strip of crayons was aligned on top of the glue and pressed down. I checked crayons individually and re-glued any that were loose.
After the colors were hot glued on, it was time to melt them with blow dryers. We used two blow dryers for 14 5/6th grade students, and found that we could have used at least one or two more. An extension cord can be handy, too, depending on your classroom set-up. I was surprised that the melting took so much time. This is a case when a bigger (heat and power) blow dryer is definitely better.

To melt this project neatly in the classroom, I brought a plastic disposable tablecloth and used painter's tape to tape it to the wall with about 1/2 of it draping on the floor. The boards were then placed on newspaper to absorb the melted crayon. This kept the melted crayons from getting spatters all over the wall and floor. I did find that we tended to melt through the plastic tablecloth right above the boards, so that was something to keep an eye on when heating the colors.

All in all, this was a great project that everyone enjoyed. It was a fun one to send home with the kids.