Save Every Last Art and Craft Your Kids Make… Forever… in One Small Box!

Ok, let’s tabulate this hypothetical situation: 3 kids, art class, twice per week, 30 weeks, plus miscellaneous school projects throughout the year = 1 bizillion treasured art projects which absolutely must be preserved.

Now let’s add in the paper maché, posterboard projects, science projects, lapbooks for you homeschoolers, and day-to-day doodling for the challenge of those 3D dilemmas.

Now we really need a storage locker. Why, we’re not quite sure, because when the kids grow up they most likely will have no interest in looking at their old artwork. But it’s important to us as parents.

How can we preserve these projects in a meaningful, organized manner? Dare we hope to be able to find any of it again?

I’ll repeat my standard mantra – hard drive space is cheap.

In this post I’ll walk you through detailed methods for preserving each type of project. Before you feel overwhelmed, remember you always have the following alternatives:

• take snapshots of each project and toss the actual projects as new ones are created
• give the projects to Grandma and let her display or “file” them
• buy a huge file cabinet
• get fed up and throw them all away
• move to a bigger house

First let’s look at the easiest art projects to deal with: pencil drawings. These can be easily scanned or photographed.

photo taken using document scene mode

I wanted to preserve this birthday card, misspellings and all. The first attempt was taken using document scene mode on the point-and-shoot camera.

The camera’s manual says that document scene mode is specifically meant for preserving documents and files. It didn’t mention that this mode turns everything grayscale.

Also note that simply laying the photo on a table leaves shadows, and glare from the lights and flash.

Let’s agree that document scene mode was not the way to go.

This is a pencil drawing with a small bit of crayon. Should be pretty straightforward to scan.

scan of pencil drawing without software corrections

This took a few attempts at the scanner to accomplish (the art will shift on the scanner) – and it looks quite washed out.

Here’s a few pointers when scanning artwork:

1. Wipe down the scanner glass before you scan to prevent stray dust from appearing on your scan.
2. Wipe down the scanner glass after you scan to clean up any residue from the artwork.
3. Make sure you know where the scan is going on your hard drive. You want to actually be able to find the file.
4. Set the scan size before you draw to ensure you capture the whole thing (or as much as possible).
5. Drawings that are slightly bent or wrinkled will shift when you close the scanner lid. Make sure you hold the project in place as you lower the lid.

Here is a corrected version:

the final image after software correction

This image was corrected in Photoshop. Most photo software can perform the corrections. Here’s what was done to enhance the photo:

1. First I cropped out the white space left by the scanner lid, remember the original image was square.
2. I performed an automatic levels correction. This told the software that the paper was white, the pencil drawings were black and the green text was someplace in the middle.

Depending on your software this may be called levels correction, histogram, or simply color correction.

Now let’s look at a crayon drawing. One with such thick crayon marks that you wouldn’t really want to put it in your scanner.

flash was used to take this photo

I didn’t even try to put the drawing on a table to photograph it. The drawing wouldn’t have laid flat. For this first attempt I taped the photo to the wall, had the camera on auto setting, and took the photo.

The camera decided to use the flash, which made the colors differ from the original artwork. For the second attempt I turned off the flash and snapped a photo.

no flash was used for this photo

As you can see, the camera left the shutter open a really long time because the flash wasn’t used. It shows the shake of the camera as I held it. To get a good shot we really need to use a tripod.

photo taken using tripod without flash

Ok, this photo shows the true colors, but it’s slightly askew and the beautiful pumpkin-colored wall is showing up as well.

This is easily corrected in Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements) using the “crop & straighten” command.

this photo was cropped and straightened in Photoshop

For this command to give you optimal results, you should have a solid colored background which isn’t on the border of the photo. For instance, if our artist had put a pumpkin-colored Santa suit on Homer, Photoshop wouldn’t be able to tell where to crop the photo.

Now let’s look at those large or 3D projects, such as science projects, dioramas, paper maché creations, etc. They take up gobs of space, but took so long to create, it’s hard to pitch them.

This is where the webcam comes in. Shortly after the project is created, and the artist is still excited to show it off, park them in front of the webcam and have them do just that.

Notice something about our artist’s t-shirt? You get a mirror image when using the webcam. Keep that in mind as it may be necessary to run the video through your video editing software and apply a mirror or flop filter.

Their excitement about a project tends to wane within a week, so you want to capture it as soon as possible. If you want to make it more interactive, you can interview the budding artist/scientist.

The video above was taken using Photobooth software, which is included on a Mac. You can’t get much simpler. Open the application, click the video camera, and click record. You can then email it, save it in iPhoto, put it on your web page, whatever you want.

If have a PC, you can use whatever software came with your webcam.

Lastly, a creative solution for ceramics projects is garden art. A wildflower garden is the perfect home for ceramics as seen below.

this ceramics project found a home in a birdbath

One of the benefits to saving their projects on computer is that the file contains the date the video/photo/scan was taken, so you know approximately when the project was created.

However you choose to preserve their artwork, try not to pressure yourself to save it all. It’s probably not possible to keep it all at best quality. It’ll wind up like your work-out schedule. You go guns blazing the first week and then quickly peter out.

Personally, we tend to take photos/video of the best ones and let the kids sort through the rest, deciding what to give to Grandma and what to throw away when their treasured art bins get full.