Crayon Painting!

Okay, this project is really fun. Slightly dangerous, too, which makes it even MORE fun! It's also cheap and easy. Fun + slightly dangerous + cheap + easy = good times!

Here's what you need:

• crayons (now's not the time to use the little broken crayon stubs, use the full-size ones) 
• paper (regular or cardstock)
• electric griddle (this creates the slightly dangerous aspect!) 
• aluminum foil

Here's what to do:

1. Cover the cooking surface of your electric griddle with aluminum foil ( so you don't end up with crayon wax in your next batch of pancakes )and gather your drawing materials. We traced a bunch of stars onto paper. I think it would also be cute to fold rectangular pieces of cardstock in half and color one side to make notecards. You'll also want the first inch or so of the paper on the crayons you'll use to be torn off prior to starting.

2. Turn your griddle on its lowest temperature setting (mine has a "warm" setting which worked just fine) and put your paper on top of the foil.

3. Start coloring! With just a little bit of pressure, the tip of the crayon starts to melt creating a liquid-y wax. The colors are much more vibrant than with regular crayon coloring ~ more like markers or paint. Where two colors overlap, you get a cool blending effect, almost like tie-dye.


4. For our stars, I found it worked best to color the shapes first and then cut them out. (That way you don't get a lot of melted wax on your foil to smear onto other pieces of paper.)

**PLEASE NOTE** Obviously, this is not one of those projects where you get your kids set up and started, then walk away. The griddle does get quite warm and they can get burned if they touch it directly for any length of time. However, my kids made it through unscathed, enjoyed making different designs and the end results were really neat.