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If you’re a parent like me, you probably collect a large treasure trove of masterpieces… paintings, drawings, collages and coloring pages. Only these aren’t museum pieces framed on our walls, these are our children’s art projects! We have art projects done at home and at playdates. School age children also bring home tons of projects from school and summer camp and daycare and everywhere else.
We love our children, of course, and treasure their creativity and development, but how much art can we keep? Many parents post the pictures enthusiastically on the refrigerator, then the walls, then put them into stacks, and finally start filling boxes with their children’s old art projects.
Believe it or not, artwork can count as clutter if you let it take over your house! You can’t keep everything – it’s simply impossible, especially if you have more than one child. How can you keep a record of all that great art without letting it take over your house?
Solution: Scan it! If you own a scanner, your solution is just a click of the mouse away. Here’s how:
- Scan the masterpiece.
- Backup the masterpiece, in one other location, like a jump drive.
- Throw away!
- If you have a state fair which your children enter their artwork in (we do), make sure they select the art pieces they want to enter so those ones aren’t discarded after scanning.
You now have all of their artwork in digital form, which takes up no physical space in your home, produces no clutter, and can be easily shared with grandmas and grandpas everywhere with a simple email! And if you want to print it out again later, you can. It works for me!
The art really is preserved well for all different mediums: oil pastel, crayon, colored pencil, marker, watercolor paint, and even Floam! Here are a few of my Hannah’s scanned masterpieces:
This was a guy made from Floam on regular paper – a little tricky to scan, but much less messy than the real thing.
Storage Solution: Scanning Kids’ Art Projects was originally published on HomeEverAfter.com on June 4, 2008.
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We have been archiving, if you will, DD’s artwork via photos – except the very special items! :) Great way to keep them without ‘storing’ them.
When I was a kid, my dad hung a big sheet of plywood on the wall in the living room, and that was our art display. All of our creations were stapled to the board, and whenever it filled up, my parents would take a picture of it, with us standing beside it. Then most of the art would get thrown out. 25 years later, we have quite a collection of photos of that art board, but they take up a lot less space than all the pictures would have!