You Saved Your Kid's Artwork. Now What?
Most advice about children's artwork stops at the same place: how to store it all. Photograph it, box it, send it away, get a book back.
Those are good answers, and we'll come to them. But storing it is only half the question.
Once the drawings are safe, you're left with a folder of images, usually without the stories that went with them, and a feeling that they should be doing something. This is a piece about that part.
Start with one question
How many pieces do you actually want to do something with?
Not how many exist. How many you'd genuinely love to see again.
That one question sorts everything else. A hundred pieces and no system is one situation. One drawing you keep coming back to is a completely different one, and they call for different answers.
Most families have both, at different times.
If you'd like the whole collection handled
Mail-in services do this well, and DoodleTale wrote a clear breakdown of what they cost that's worth reading before you order. You can also do it yourself with a phone and a photo book service, which takes longer and costs very little.
Either way, that's the picture saved. The rest of this is about everything after.
If you'd like them to use it, not just keep it
A drawing in a book gets looked at now and then. A drawing on a lunch box goes to school every day.
That difference is bigger than it sounds. Kids treat something printed very differently from something stored, and it seems to be because one of them lives out in the world where other people can see it. A friend of my son's guards his pixyit lunch box carefully, even though other things go missing all the time.
So it helps to pick things that get carried and seen. Tees, bags, water bottles, hats. Blankets and framed prints are lovely too, and they're mostly admired by people who already love your kid. Something they carry gets noticed by strangers, and the strangers are the part that surprises them.
At pixyit, families keep the artwork along with the story behind it, in the child's own words, and turn favourites into things they'll actually use. The child earns 3% when their work sells, and we donate 5% to youth nonprofits.
If one drawing is the whole point
Sometimes there's a single piece you keep coming back to, and putting it in a book with two hundred others isn't quite right.
DoodleTale starts from the other end. You upload one drawing and it becomes a printed storybook where that drawing is the main character and your child is the named hero. One piece, one book, and the original stays at home.
We love this one. It gives a single drawing the attention a whole collection can't. A book of everything is something you show visitors. A storybook is something a child brings to you at bedtime.
If you'd like it to do some good
Children's artwork is wonderful at fundraising, and it's underused.
School auctions, class art sales, community fundraisers. A print of a child's drawing raises more than most things a PTA can put on a table, because everyone bidding knows the kid.
On pixyit, 5% of every order goes to youth nonprofits, with the Association of Children's Museums as our default partner.
Here's why it works so well. Kids discover very quickly that something they made can do something for someone else, and that lands harder than the money does. My daughter earned 25 cents from a water bottle and immediately asked if she could give it to her school.
If you'd like your child to remember making it
This is the one we'd recommend hardest, and it's free.
The drawing lasts. The reason behind it doesn't. Ask a child about something they made a year ago and watch them shrug. They know it's theirs. They just don't remember why.
So whatever else you do, try this: ask what's happening in the drawing, and write down what they say in their words rather than a tidied-up version. "A cat that spits and fails school" is worth so much more in a year than "cat drawing, age 6."
Ten seconds, no cost, nothing to buy. It's the only one on this list that gets harder the longer you leave it.
pixyit helps families and organizations turn kids' creativity into something lasting: a living gallery of their artwork and the stories behind it, and favourites that become real keepsakes. Every purchase gives back too, with a royalty to the child and a donation to youth nonprofits. Our mission is to help kids feel proud of their creativity and do good with it. Start a free Family Gallery at
If you work at a museum, school, or program and this sounds like your world, we'd love to talk. partners@pixyit.com
