Kids and preteens can go beyond using crayons to color pictures on the backs of restaurant place mats with these kids’ crafts that require little more than a box of crayons. Give these inexpensive crayon craft ideas a try, and turn those broken and forgotten about Crayolas a new lease on life.
Note: Although cheap crayons may seem like a deal, the colors tend to be faded and low quality and they may not work for the projects below. Crayola crayons really are worth the price. If you don’t have any lying around, be sure to look for back to school deals, or look on your local Freecycle or Buy Nothing groups (or even at garage sales) for unloved colors that someone would love to give you.
Inexpensive CRAYON Craft Ideas
Crayon Resists
This art and craft project requires crayons, watercolor paints, and watercolor paper. Kids draw a picture with crayon; but they don’t want to cover the entire page with crayon. For example, if they are drawing a landscape, they may want to leave the sky uncolored. When they are finished drawing the elements they want to with the crayons, they then bring out the watercolor paints.
The kids will then paint over their drawing with the watercolors. They can add in the sky or color over any area of their drawing. The wax crayon will resist the watercolor paints. The paint will adhere to any part of the paper that wasn’t protected by the crayon. This creates a unique effect that will amaze younger children!
Kids can have fun exploring the different effects they can create with resist drawings.
Texture Rubbings
This is a great project for those old, broken crayons that kids never seem to want to use when they color pictures. Peel the paper off the crayons. Now, with crayons and paper in hand, go around the house and outdoors and look for flat objects with interesting textures. Flower petals, leaves, LEGO blocks, stencils, folders, corrugated cardboard boxes, pencil boxes, textures walls, baskets, and more make great surfaces to rub.
Set the paper over the object and hold the crayon so you can rub the length of the crayon over the paper, revealing the texture of the object.
Kids will need to practice this several times because holding the paper down with one hand and running a crayon over the page with the other hand takes some coordination. If the rubbings come out blurred, keep practicing.
Scratch Art for Kids
Yes, you can purchase scratch art paper, but making the paper is easy to do and much less expensive. Color an entire piece of paper, leaving absolutely no white. It isn’t necessary to draw a picture, just color blotches of colors or color geometric shapes, again filling in every spot with crayon.
Next, paint over the entire piece of paper with black tempera paint. Washable paint may not adhere to the waxy crayon. When the paint is completely dried, kids can scratch away parts of the paint to draw a picture. Try using a sharp bamboo skewer, a toothpick, or an unfolded paperclip as a drawing implement.
Iron-on Crafts
Color a picture onto a piece of sandpaper (it doesn’t matter whether it is coarse or fine, you’ll get different effects). Make the picture bright by drawing over the image several times with the crayon. Heat an iron on a warm setting. Set the colored piece of sandpaper image-side down on a piece of white paper.
Place a few sheets of newspaper over the sandpaper and run the iron over the entire stack. The heat from the iron will melt the crayon off the sandpaper and onto the paper. The texture of the sandpaper will show up on the picture as a pebbly effect.
Of course, crayons work great for coloring pictures, all you need is some white paper. Have fun exploring the variety of art and craft projects you can do using crayons as your key craft material.