Creating a Photo Book with Your Children’s Art

The girls’ last week of school just ended, and mid-way through the week, we received their beautiful art folders. I loved going through each piece with Isla and Emi – they were so proud of what they had created! At the beginning of the year, I downloaded the Artkive app and had planned to upload photos of the girls’ art throughout the year – forgetting that most art comes home at the end. Instead of uploading to the app (which is still a great idea!), I decided to make Artifact Uprising books to fit in with the other photo books I make throughout the year. I absolutely love their quality!

Although I have put off this task for the past few years, it went really quickly, and I want to share how I did it so that you can make these too if the thought of storing 30+ pieces of art for each of your kids for years and years seems overwhelming. After doing the 2019-2020 school year, I made a catch-up book for each girl for the previous years.

The key for these books is to focus on the art and not making each book too perfect. That would definitely slow you down!

I chose to use 7×7 Everyday book from Artifact Uprising. Any of their books are gorgeous, but these are one of the most affordable books they offer. It’s still hardcover, which I love and you can write on the spine. I did both of the girls’ 2019-2020 books in the same color, then their catch-ups books in another matching color. On the spines, I wrote “EMI’S ART 2019-2020” and on the cover, I wrote MOTHER’S DAY OUT (or “ISLA’S ART 2019-2020” and “KINDERGARTEN”). I thought about this a lot and wanted to know by the spine whose book it was and the year, then the cover would tell me which grade/school they were in when making the art. One key thing to note with the Everyday book is that you can only pick 30, 40 or 50 pages. That worked for 2 of the 4 books as they had exactly 30 pieces of art, and for the other 2, I added a few photos of each girl during that specific year.

Steps to Creating an Art Photo Book

1. Get a large piece of white poster board or mat board and lay it in an equally light-balanced part of your house. For me, that was my office with my blind pulled down. The balanced light will stop shadows from appearing on the board. Alternatively, you can lay the art on one board and have someone else hold up a white board to block harsh light.
2. With your art stacked next to you, get your DSLR settings right (or iPhone works as well) and then snap each photo one after another without changing your camera settings, if possible. I think it is easiest to use the full-page square layout on Artifact Uprising, so I tried to photograph each piece of art with a square crop in mind.
3. After you have photographed all of your pieces, import your photos into Lightroom. I only took one of each piece and never changed my settings, so the editing went very quickly. I edited the first photo to the coloring that looked good and the square crop that worked for that piece of art, then right clicked on the photo, went to Develop Settings < Copy Settings , then selected all of the photos that I had imported and went to Develop Settings < Paste Settings. At that point, I quickly clicked through each piece – mainly to adjust the square crop, which didn’t take long. At that point, I selected all 30 pieces of art, then exported them to a specific Isla’s/Emi’s Art folder.
4. In Artifact Uprising, I chose the Everyday 7×7 book. I did the 2019-2020 year books in Seamist and the 2016/2017-2019 books in Rose. I chose gold font for each. As I mentioned earlier, I wrote “EMI’S ART 2019-2020” on the spine and MOTHER’S DAY OUT on the cover (or “ISLA’S ART 2019-2020” and “KINDERGARTEN”). I chose the 30 page option.
5. Once in the book, you chose Add Images, then upload all of the art pictures. Once the photos are in, you will want to change the type of layout on each page to the full bleed square. Once every page layout is updated, I chose the Autofill option and had them “Start from Scratch.” If you wanted them chronologically, you could do it yourself, but like I said earlier, I wasn’t going for perfection.
6. If you don’t have exactly 30 pieces of art (or have 35 and chose the 40 page option), I filled in the pages with photos as well as a photo of the girls’ end-of-year feedback from their teachers, which I think is something nice to preserve!
7. Once you’ve double checked each page, you are done! Artifact Uprising has a 10% off discount code this weekend, which I’m going to be using to orders the girls’ books!