Children's Art Collage

If you have small children, you undoubtedly struggle with what to do with the barage of artwork that accompanies them home from school on a daily basis.  My husband is of the mind to save anything our three children have scribbled upon, whereas I am not afraid to save a tree and hit up the paper recycling dumpster at the "transfer station" on a regular basis. 

Obviously though, I delight in and save the good stuff, of which there is much.  But, what to do with it?  For my husband's birthday, I decided to collapse our favorite pieces into one colorful work of art.  I took my idea to artist Kristen Fitzgerald, and with the help of our local digital printing company, this is what we came up with:

There was a huge amount of trial and error involved, as we tried different methods of capturing the artwork and laying it out.  Ultimately, we decided that scanning the images did not produce the results we wanted, so Kristen photographed each of the 80 pieces of art in her studio, and then cropped them to appear the same size.  My girls then visited Kristen's studio and painted their names to create the artists' signatures in the lower right-hand side of the piece.  Following a gripping 20 minute encounter involving Kristen's cat decapitating a mouse just outside the studio, we were on our way!

Litho-craft did a superb job laying out the pieces while balancing for color.  After a few edits, we had our final result, which you'll see hanging in my kitchen below:

My husband told me the piece was the best gift he's ever been given (albeit three weeks late), and I believe him.  To compile yours, click here.

Cheers,

Deb