Nothing Normal Art

"Dad, why can't you be normal?"

"He is normal. The word you're looking for is average."  

~Utah Phillips

I first learned about using hair dryers to melt crayons from MaryLea over on her outstanding blog Pink and Green Mama, but according to her it had been making the rounds all summer in the form of using the process to make melted crayon rainbows.

The basic idea is to glue an entire box of fresh crayons in a tidy row across the top of a canvas, lean it against a wall, then power up a hair dryer, which causes the crayons to melt and run down the canvas in rainbow stripes. We actually do have a box of fresh crayons, but we have an even bigger box into which I've dumped literally thousands of "junker" crayons over the years and, as I do with all these cool things I find on the internet, I asked myself, "How can the kids do this themselves?"

As you can see, many of the kids almost right away rejected my idea of white tag board, 

opting instead for construction paper from our journal table.

The mental experiment convinced me that it was unlikely that many of them would have the patience to do all that gluing, nor did I want to make them take turns with one big, single canvas, so I figured we'd scale the thing down. What we'd lose in a dramatic final product, we'd gain in participation and ownership.

They were also not at all inspired by my "demo" on which I'd arranged

6 crayons in a tidy row across the top, choosing instead to treat

this stage in the process as a creative one as well.

The basic idea was for the kids to count out the number of crayons they wanted to use, afix them with glue guns to a piece of tag board (because we can't afford canvases for each of them, although I am kicking myself for not remembering the pad of canvas paper in the storage room), which was attached to a clipboard, then take a turn with one of the inexpensive hair dryers I picked up at Goodwill.

In my mental experiment, the kids were wild about the project from the get-go, but in reality they were more than a little trepidatious. Many seemed uncomfortable with the sound and fury of those hair dryers and not at all impressed with the first minute or so of the process during which nothing obvious was happening, but we persevered, despite tripping the safety shut off on our power strip, causing us to spread the dryers out over several outlets in different parts of the room. 

We experimented with how and how far away to hold the hair dryers and soon we were seeing the wax liquify. If MaryLea mentioned this, I somehow missed it, but some of us were a little put off at first by the fact that our hot wax wasn't just running down the paper, but spattering as well. 

And I don't mean just a little bit of spattering. We were scraping it off counter tops and walls.

Of course, this may be something that could have been corrected for by turning the dryers down to "low," but where's the fun in that? Instead we learned how to direct the spatter by how we aimed our hair dryers.

As the process continued, as we started to understand how this worked, everyone got more comfortable, and what had started as a handful of individuals working in their own little worlds of hot air, glue guns, and melting wax, evolved into a community project as we began to talk with one another about what was going on, about our own experiences, giving advice, pointing things out and generally discussing what we were noticing about a process in which none of us had ever before engaged.

We just can't seem to do anything "normal" at Woodland Park. But we do know how to have fun.

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