Petite Monet

Our little Ellen is quite the prolific artist. We have gobs and gobs of masterpieces that come home from school, and are made at home, and end up in piles in her playroom before I recycle them.

I really don't feel bad about throwing away the ones that are "scribbles", for lack of a better word. I do keep all the "project" type items that come home from school, and some especially nice paintings or the first drawings of people or letters, for example.

But, how to keep them for the long term?

I have seen tons of great ideas online and on Pinterest. Coffee table "art" books of your child's art. Or scanning the artwork and then creating a big poster. Rotating the pieces in and out of a wall of frames.

I really like the coffee table art book idea the best, though I am sort of paralyzed when it comes to taking a good quality photo of the art to begin with and getting the lighting correct and more or less standard from picture to picture. Our scanner is super old and smallish, so really won't work for this kind of project.

I also saw this new app on Cool Mom Tech this week - ArtKive. It sounds like a similar idea -you can take pictures of your child's artwork and it stores them in some way, then eventually you can make a book. I haven't figured it all out, but it's free to download for a short period of time, so I downloaded it and will figure it out later!