Turn your kids' artwork into a printed book

Keep all of it, in one book

Children make a lot of art. Keeping every piece takes a closet; throwing it away feels terrible. A printed book is the middle way: every drawing kept, at a size you can hold, in a book that sits on a shelf and survives being looked at a hundred times. One book a year becomes a set.

1. Photograph the art

A modern phone photo has plenty of detail for a full page. A few things make the difference:

• shoot in even daylight, near a window, without the flash
• hold the phone straight above the drawing so the edges are square
• photograph the whole sheet, edges included, so you can crop later
• do a batch at the end of each month rather than a mountain at the end of the year

Move the photos to your PC, or save a scan of several pages as one PDF.

2. Start a Square book

Choose Start a new notebook and pick the Square shape, the photo book shape, at 7.5 or 8.5 inches. Every page is laid out for print from the start. See page shapes.

3. Put the art on the pages

In the notebook, open the sticker drawer and tap the add tile to bring in your photos, several at once. Tap one to place it on a page and resize it to fill the space. Double-tap to crop away the table edge. Nothing you crop is lost, so you can reframe it later.

For a drawing on white paper, you can also lift it off the paper entirely. Drop the photo into the Sticker Book as a pack and Mementa Notebook removes the white background, so the drawing can sit on a colored page of its own. A drawing with separate parts, a sun, a house and a dog, may come back as several boxes: merge them, or draw one box around the whole picture, before you peel. The keep and erase brushes clean up the edge. See sticker peeling.

If you scanned the drawings into a PDF, open it from your shelf and tap the pencil instead. Every scan becomes a page of the book.

4. Add the name and the date

Write the artist's name, their age and the date beside each piece with the pen. Better still, hand them the pen and let them write the caption themselves, in their own letters. Or add a text box if you prefer it typed. A line like "Our house, by Maya, age 5, March" is what makes the book precious in twenty years.

5. Make the cover their best piece

The cover designer lays out the front, spine and back as one wrap at the real size. Put their favorite drawing on the front and their name and the year as the title. Checks makes sure the art is sharp enough and runs past the cut before you pay.

6. Order it

Choose premium color ink so crayon and paint come through, on 80# coated paper, the photo book stock. Hardcover holds up to small hands best. Order one copy, or one for every grandparent: the quote shows the price per copy and the total before you pay. In the US, softcover starts from $20 and hardcover from $34, with shipping included. See printed books.

Ideas

• one book per child per school year
• a book of every drawing they made for you
• first words, first letters, first self portrait
• a holiday book of cards and crafts
• a grandparent's gift with a photo of the child holding each piece

Questions