Photographing kids art

There are lots of great ideas on how to store kids art and how to pick what you are going to keep out of the mass amounts of art they make. I have to admit to hardly keeping any of Tuesday’s art… in it’s original form. It’s not that I don’t want to; most often what happens is that we reuse the art for something else. Either a base of the next art project, or we turn paintings and drawings into journal covers, gift tags, and scrapbook backgrounds. With Tuesday’s large acrylic paintings on canvas I know we are not going to keep them all because right now we’re working on gift paintings. The ones we do keep will probably end up painted over many times (I should know, half of them have my old paintings underneath!). I really want to preserve this moment in her artistic journey though so I’ve made a habit of pulling out her artwork and photographing it.

Her canvases are always changing (we work on these together. I posted some tips here and here) because I she paints on the same ones over and over. I like to take them upstairs in the afternoon when light is coming in through the sliding door (that you can’t see, to the left of this photo) on a sunny day. This way I have consistent light, but it’s not harsh and direct. I may just lean the paintings up like this and snap a few shots (1/200 sec at f/ 1.8, ISO 640, 35mm 1.8 lens).

I’ll also put the paintings on the floor and hop up on a chair to lean over and get the painting with out anything cluttering up the background (1/80 sec at f 1.8, ISO 200, 35mm 1.8 lens).
But by far my favorite thing to do is lean them up in great (indirect) light and get close up detail shots. I love seeing all her marks this way.

 


 

 

 
(all above shots 1/60 – 1/100 sec at f 1.8, ISO 200, 35mm 1.8 lens) That last one is my desktop wallpaper and I love it so so so much. Ohhhh I just had a genius idea to do notecards out of these! You could also print and frame these as is. Of the above all have been painted over at least a little so I’m so glad to have these shots. Celebrate your little artist and snap some photos of their work today!

Join the Conversation

217 Comments

  1. What beautiful paintings! Glad you took pictures… Looks like they would make beautiful prints.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *