Flying colours

Hello bewdas and bewdis,

Too many of you have asked how Xena and I made the elephant artwork featured in the previous post. Since good things must be shared, here are the details.

What you need: 

- A blank mounted canvas

- Scissors

- Black paper
- Crayons

- Glue

- A hair dryer

Step 1: Think of a concept you want to make a picture out of. Xena was given the following three options, but you can do almost anything actually. 

Step 2: Cut out the desired shape (e.g. the elephant's head) on the black paper. Fortunately for us, the cut-outs had already been made by the hosts, so we just needed to pick one. 

Step 3: Select the crayons you want to use (we chose rainbow colours) and break them into thirds. 

Step 4: Place the black cut-out on the canvas (do not stick it yet) and stick the crayons on the canvas with glue. 

Step 5: After the glue has dried, use a hair dryer and melt away! Tilt the canvas to control where the flowing wax goes. I don't have a picture of us using the hair dryer on our picture, but here's another kid using the hair dryer on her picture. This should give you an idea of what to do. 

Step 6: Stick the black cut-out over the melted and dried wax. Ta-da!

Xena used some fluffy beads to decorate her artwork. To be honest, I'd have preferred not to have them at all (I feel it looked classier without), but she really really wanted them... that too, all over the painting. Yikes. So we negotiated and reached a compromise -- we would have the beads, but they would match their background.