Jollying with crayons!

Okay, first things first. Jollying is a real word. I had to get a word starting with J for the today's challenge, so  I looked it up ;-)

And today it is about having fun with crayons. Though water colours are our first love, we also spend a lot of time doodling with crayons. Water colours involve taking mommy's help, so crayons are handy when baby is interested in colouring and mommy is not ;-) ( though today's project is different; it ended up with active work and contribution from mommy too). Crayons are also good use for borders in water colour art. They give a polished look to the picture when done. Oil pastels are simply awesome, the regular wax crayons are no match for the soft texture and ease of use of the pastel colours. They do end sooner, though.

Today's craft involved a new idea. Melting crayons! Now I'm not a big fan of wastage; using melted crayons can be indirect wastage because they end up much sooner than if you use them for regular shading. But we have an armory of broken, I-will-never-pick-them-again crayons that are just lying around. There is this one set of crayons that I purchased from John Lewis that are simply pathetic. So basically my search for a project in crayons started with putting these to use in mind. And what a lovely idea it turned out to be! I felt like an accomplised artist when it was all done! :-)

Another new idea we used here was canvas paper - I have read enough about canvas papers for kids' art but I've never bought them; I have never personally used them in my life either. I always thought those are for the budding painters! But seeing so much of art online made me want to try that out as well. So here goes our artwork for the day.

I bought a booklet of canvas sheets and took out the first one. I asked A what to draw on it; I  mentioned to her that since we are melting crayons, the drawing will be richly coloured; she jumped with the idea of a rainbow! So we started with drawing a rainbow. We used a simple Mister Maker trick to draw out a perfect rainbow. On a piece of paper, point out a centre. Then after leaving sufficient space, draw out 8 equidistant points. We placed our dots one and a half inches apart. Draw a pencil through the dots to make holes. 

Once you are done, place a pencil in the first dot and place this paper on your paper. Now place another pencil in the next dot that will be the first on your rainbow and loosely move the pencil 180 deg on your sheet, so as to draw a semi-circle.

I hope you got the idea. Repeat the same with all the other  dots and you have got yourself a rainbow. We then proceeded to draw a sun and some clouds as well. This is how our drawing looked.

Even if there are any random scrawls on your paper, like you can see on ours, you don't need to worry. The colours will take care of them. 

Then we started with our project. We took a tea light candle and got about with the first colour. Now A is a little scared of fire and I did not in any manner want to allay that fear. So I just worked around it and told her she can be careful and try if she wanted to, as I would be hovering around her all the time. I also gave her a choice to just watch as mommy does the colouring. She did not like the second idea one bit and wanted to try it once. What I did was, give her the longer sticks and asked her to only make dots in the centre of the rainblow, not the whole thing. Like this -

A was happy to contribute just as much and I completed the rest of the picture. And this is how our rainbow looked -

A was completely uninterested in doing the sky and the clouds, so the rest of the project was completely mine. This is how the completed crayon work looked!

Isn't it nice and bright? I later learnt that this artwork, when used by painters for their art, goes by the name of pointillism.

 I wasn't very happy with all the white areas showing so I decided to try colouring on them with water coloours. I thought they might give a fuller look to the picture. A helped me with this.

And, ta-daaa! This is our final product!

What do you think? Doesn't it deserve to be decorated and put on the wall? :-)

Please note : Since the stubs of crayon are pretty thick on the paper, the stubs keep coming off if you drop the picture or move it around a lot. So ideally, a permanent spot on the wall or a picture frame is necessary.