Introduction: Melting Crayons and Carving Them Into a Sculpture
I almost set my house on fire melting 500 Crayons. The idea was simple, put a bunch of #crayons into a frying pan, #melt them and pour them into a large mold to then carve into a sculpture. This turned out to be a disaster because the crayons all caught on #fire and almost sent my house up in flames. Lesson learned... Well kind of. I ended up torching small batches of crayons and then pouring them into the mold. From there I used woodworking tools to chisel away and carve the block of crayons into a sculpture! I love art projects like this that take a unique material and transform them into something else. let me know what you think in the comments!
Step 1: Collect Crayons
I used around 500 Crayons for this sculpture.
Step 2: Peel Off Wrapper From Every Crayon.
This took a LONG time. I would highly recommend getting JUMBO crayons if you are doing a large sculpture. I used a razor blade to cut and peel all crayons.
Step 3: Make Pouring Mold
I created a mold to pour the melted crayons into by using some scrap plywood. I coated the inside surface with some tape so that the crayons would not stick to the wood.
Step 4: DON'T DO THIS!
In my first attempt I thought if I put the crayons into a frying pan I could melt them and easily pour them into the mold. WOW was I wrong. The crayons went up in FLAMES! DO NOT DO THIS! This was a big fail for me and I almost ended up burning my house down because of it.
Step 5: Melt Crayons in Small Amounts and Pour Them.
Once the frying pan disaster, I switched to using a little cup and melting individual colors at a time using a torch. again I WOULDN'T Recommend doing it this way. If I were to go back, I would use a bread pan and stick all the crayons in the oven.
Step 6: Let the Melted Crayons Cool.
I let the mold of melted crayons cool overnight. The next morning I got them out of the mold to reveal really cool color patterns!
Step 7: Chisel Away the Sculpture Outline
Now for the fun part! Using wood chisels I chipped away at the outline of my bear. It is good to go nice and slow because you could end up fracturing the entire block (yes I did this). If your block does fracture, use the torch to heat both sides and push them together. This actually worked surprisingly well.
Step 8: Refine the Details
Still using the wood chisels I refined the bears facial and body features. This was extremely rewarding work. It is so smooth and fun to carve the crayons. It is much more pleasurable carving crayons than wood because there is no sawdust and you don't have to use power tools.
Step 9: Test the Crayon Sculpture.
I needed to test my crayon sculpture right??? The cool thing about this is the bear sculpture has different color crayons throughout. This means that I can use different parts of the sculpture to color!
Step 10: The Final Product.
I didn't spend a TON of time carving this thing because this was just a fun project for me to do with some downtime. I am still pleased with how the bear sculpture turned out, however I wish there was more color variances in it. next time I will be putting the crayons into the oven, which will hopefully give me some nice color variances.