The kids and I made these colorful wooden art blocks yesterday. We all agreed they are wonderful and want to make a whole bunch of them, both for the chance to make some more (they were a lot of fun!) and so we can have a set of artful building blocks for stacking towers and building castles.
I have
my artist friend Meg to thank for this idea. She said she saw my post on
melted crayon rocks and wanted to make some with her daughter. But instead of rocks, which she didn't have, she used her plentiful supply of wood blocks. (She's the one who painted
these lovely blocks for me.) As soon as she told me about her melted crayon blocks, I had to try them!
Meg orders her wood blocks online (and we used three of hers), but you could probably also make your own from hardware store wood, find some at a craft store, or get this kind of wood. In addition to the blocks, we tried this technique on some flat pieces of wood from Lowes.
First, we put our wood pieces on a cookie sheet in a 350 degree F oven to heat up. Once the blocks were hot, we set them on the towel-protected table and we each drew on ours with crayons. The crayon melted as we drew, just as it did with the melted crayon rocks, although not quite as dramatically just because the wood didn't get as hot as the rocks did.
While I didn't feel that working with the hot rocks was safe for my two year old, she safely drew on the hot wooden block and wood pieces alongside Maia and me. The wood didn't hold the heat like the rocks did and the risk of burning was much lower.
After we did our melted crayon drawings on the wood, we got out our
liquid watercolors
and painted over the drawings.
The watercolor resist worked great on the wood!
Here's an art piece Maia made by tracing the grain of the wood with her melted crayon drawing. (See how the watercolor pools a bit over the thick crayon lines? We used a paper towel to blot it off before it dried.)
Here's one of Daphne's artworks on wood...
...plus two more of Maia's.
And here are a few more views of our wooden art blocks.
We all LOVED this project! We loved the melted crayon drawings (as always), loved the watercolor resist, loved working on wood, and really love our art blocks. We plan to make lots of these colorful building blocks as soon as we can get our hands on some more plain wooden ones!
P.S. My computer is broken and this is my first attempt to draft a blog post on my iPad (using the
Blogsy app). I'm still figuring my way around Blogsy, my iPad, and the photo editing software apps available and am hoping it all works okay. Please excuse any formatting and other inconsistencies.
If you enjoyed this post, please share your thoughts in the comments, share the post with your friends, or subscribe to receive blog updates through e-mail or your reader. Thank you!
