Melted Crayon Painting

(Goblin is 27 months)

I'm sure if you have looked at more than one kid based blog you have probably already seen the ubiquitous crayon melt painting. Well now it is my turn.
I have been wanting to do this with Goblin for ages but I didn't now how toddler friendly it was. Of the various posts I have read on the topic I couldn't gauge how long it would take for the crayons to melt and I didn't want to start an activity with Goblin only to discover they took hours to melt - Goblin would simply get bored and walk away and I'd end up doing it alone. So I decided to do a test run first.

 I decided to do a seascape. I bought three packs of 24 crayons and took out all the blus and greens and a few greys as well. (I got the packs in Tesco and they were less than £1 each - and I still have all the reds, pinks and yellows left to play with). I stuck them to one of my 4 budget canvases using PVA glue. I was going to use a glue gun but then realised it would be a bit stupid to glue the crayons using glue that melts rather than hardens when it gets warm. I also stuck a magazine cut out of a boat onto the canvas. The idea was to make waves that would surround the boat.

 I borrowed my Mother-in-law's hairdryer because ours is an eco hairdryer so it doesn't actually get hot.  I was amazed how fast the crayons melted. Within less than a minute there were splashes coming off the first ones and the whole thing took less that ten minutes.

 I was very glad I put down a plastic mat because the crayons did splash quite a lot and I imagine they would be really difficult to get out of pretty much any other material.

Verdict: Very Toddler friendly  

The boat got a bit buried because once the crayons started melting they ran too quickly to control, so I stuck a couple of extra boats on after the picture had dried (which was super fast again, about two minutes).
If I was going to do a seascape again I think I might paint the canvas pale blue of grey to show stormy skies. But now I have red, yellow, orange and pink crayons to use with Goblin. Any ideas?

Although its been done many times before I thought I'd still share this on a few linkups.