If you have young kids, you likely have a fridge door covered with you children’s artwork and perhaps boxes of other art and projects that you can’t bear to part with. But what do you do when they really start piling up? There is an easy solution to preserving these little treasures for everyone to enjoy and eliminating the clutter: either use a photo scanning service or scan the items at home and save them to CD or DVD for posterity. By scanning your children’s artwork to digital you can store and share the photos in a myriad of ways.
Here are a few creative things you can do with your kids’ scanned artwork:
- Create a photo book featuring your budding artist’s best finger paintings, papier-mâché and other favorite artworks.
- Make a calendar each year featuring your child’s drawings, paintings and other pictures on each month. You can use a single photo for each page or add several images, plus add captions, titles and text if you wish. Your kids will be proud to show off their special calendar and it’s something everyone will enjoy all year long. Calendars also make excellent gifts for grandparents.
- Create a slide show to display your child’s best art and share it with their grandparents and other family.
- Make a collage poster of your child’s favorite art work – you can do this easily by scanning it and then uploading the digital images to an online photo service like Snapfish.com
, which has a great selection of photo gifts.
- How about a puzzle with your child’s scanned artwork as the theme.
- Make note cards featuring your child’s best art on the cover.
- Design a set of coasters or mugs with a different piece of art on each one.
- Use one of the scanned artworks as a screensaver on your computer. You can even create a rotating display of several different pictures.
- Print and frame a scanned photo of one of your child’s masterpieces for your desk or your wall.
- Print out pictures of the artwork for a scrapbook or photo album.
- If you have a special favorite, you can even scan it then convert it into canvas art for their bedroom wall. Think how proud they will be to show it off!
Snapfish.com by HP has some great ideas for converting your kid’s art to photo gifts, from mouse pads t0 collage posters and place mats.
Snapfish has a great selection of photo gifts for your kids' masterpieces
Most of all, get your kids involved. After all, they are their treasures, and they may have ideas for captions and titles.
If you don’t have an all-in-one printer/scanner to do the scanning at home, there are numerous scanning services that will do the job for you. Just ship them the artwork and they will return it along with a CD or DVD with the scanned images.
Photograph the Art
Another alternative that works well with awkward pieces that won’t easily fit on a scanner bed is to take a photograph of the art. Lay it flat against a solid white background, zoom in to be sure you get all the details, and use the flash.
What kinds of things should you ship off to the scanning service or scan at home? Well, pretty much everything. You can scan artwork, greeting cards, old photos and any other special treasures. Once you have the digitized versions you can pitch the originals without feeling guilty, or keep just a few select favorites. Not only will you have everything safely preserved, you will de-clutter your house at the same time.
