Crayola Art

BOOK CLUB ASSIGNMENT

The ZNE Book Club continues with projects from Traci Bautista’s book “Collage Unleashed“. This week we are playing with crayons. We were to take broken crayons and place them in muffin tins lined with foil and heat them for about 10 minutes at 250 degrees. This created a very colorful crayon cupcake. After cooling we applied the crayon cupcake to a heated iron and then apply the iron to cardstock, and create a fabulous background. Be sure you get specific instructions and use an old iron, before you try this at home. I used some of the crayons I had at home, and loved it so much, I went over to our church and “borrowed” one of the huge dishpans of crayons. I plan on picking thru them and getting out the old broken ones and do some more with this. ( I’ll take the rest back, but have you ever known a school or Sunday school to run out of crayons, at some point you always get new ones before the old ones run out. They seem to clone themselves.) So here is a great use for those crayon stubs that the kids don’t want to use.




















CHILDHOOD CRAYOLA MEMORIES

Next! We were to talk about a childhood crayon experience. I always remember the first day of school and getting new crayons. As little kids we got those jumbo crayons. We each got our own set of 8 in a real box with a lid, not a fold over flap. I remember one girl who sat behind me who always borrowed my purple crayon, it seems it was her favorite color and she wanted to keep her crayon perfect. She did, she used mine all year. I tried not to sit by her after that.














MOST MEMORIBLE CRAYOLA EXPERIENCE

My most memorable experience with crayons was in 1997. I was taking a drawing class at the local community college. We usually drew our projects with “prismacolor” pencils. Our last project for the year was to make some sort of imaginary drawing that in some way involved a Monopoly ( the board game) board, cards, dice, playing pieces, etc. I don’t know what I was thinking about, but I saw a short article in the newspaper, about that time , at the back of the business section, that inspired my project. The article stated that Smith-Binney ( owners of Crayola) was closing its Winfield, Kansas Crayola manufacturing plant. The company only made $92 million in profits and had anticipated $96 million, or some other ridiculous figure. Winfield had recently suffered from the closing of a state hospital and an oil refinery. The job losses were pretty large. The community was also going to suffer from the loss of tourism as many folks passing thru Kansas on the way to other attractions would stop for a tour of the plant.
Thus my art project evolved. I made this illuminated manuscript / stained glass window to lament the closing of the Crayola factory, and decided to do it with crayon. You notice the bad folks are all on their way to …..with out passing GO? Who knows ? The photos are not the best, the piece is framed,and has glass so there was some reflection from the flash. And it is really large. I enjoyed doing this, coming up with the color palette. I never thought about the color palette of my crayons when I had only 8.





Check out the slide show below!