For those that have kids, or have people in the home that are developing a new craft or skill there is always the difficulty of dealing with the endless sheets of artwork. As they are a flat medium, there is limited opportunity to display them, and once stacked are hard to access and view.
In the learning phase, each successive piece supersedes yesterdays pieces. It’s good to see the development of the person’s artwork over time, and it’s always good to show the person how you value their abilities and improvement.
The following is a space saving technique to manage the artwork through digitisation
Setting expectations
First step is setting expectations on how long the artwork will be stored and displayed in the home. It’s good to display in a prominent place in the home.
Setting up Google Photos (or similar) account
- Setup a google photos account. Can be easy add on if you have a gmail account
- Change settings to high res if you want unlimited storage. Full res if you are ok to pay when you hit the storage limits
- Create folders for each child / person calling it eg. “Max’s art creations”
- Download google photos app on your smart phone
- Sync to your good photos account
- Sync your photos to google photos so that everything is automatically synced
Photograph the work
Lay the artwork on the ground, preferably not under sunlight so that there are no shadows
Flatten any curled edges. Place books over it if it has crumpled up in the kids school bag
Photograph the work
Organising the work
If your phone is set to syc when you have wifi, tap the update button
Copy relevant pics to the “Max’s art creations”
Displaying the work
If your children are old enough, show them how they can view the album on the desktop and on the phone.
If artwork comes up in conversation, or you are reviewing current work, bring up older pieces and show the child how they have improved
Publish collages of the artwork and send to family and friends. If your comfortable, publish onto instagram or facebook
Print selected pieces and put them into an album
Filtering
Google are getting quite clever with the recognition of the artwork. It can search by:
Medium – paper, fabric, sculpture
Colour – ie purple, blue, green
Content – ie. fish, mountains, beach
Every year google improve the recognition, so your digitised albums can become more accessible over time, rather than your original works taking up space, gathering dust and not being accessible
Decluttering through digitisation saves on space, time and money. For further tips on how decluttering can save you money, see also free ebook on “24 ways decluttering can save you money”