Best way to convert kids' art to digital photo format?

[cmo]

Our preschool class wants to do an end-of-year gift for the teachers, and since I am not so current on camera & computer tricks, I'd like to ask for advice.

The project is for each child to draw a picture of their teacher. Each drawing will probably be on different colored paper (or maybe do it on white, then use the computer to vary the backgrounds?). Then, each needs to be converted to a digital format so they can be used to make a Shutterfly collage. There are 16 kids, so it would be a 4-by-4 layout on an 11x14 photo collage.

So that's the idea, but I am a bit stumped on how to execute it. Do I just take a photo of the artwork, or would we lose photo quality? Is there an easy way to scan the artwork -- do photo stores or those Kodak kiosks do that? If you have Photoshop, Shutterfly, or any experience that would be helpful, please let me know!

Thanks very much,
Chris

[WatchingThemGrow]

I've taken pics and scanned K artwork. Scanning seemed easier/better quality, but you try one of each first with a your own equipment. Putting them in a book might be a good idea too! - like a shutterfly book.

[lmintzer]

I scanned first grade artwork last year to make a Photobook for the teacher. It worked very well. One thing that I did was made sure I turned off "Vividpix" or whatever Shutterfly's auto-photo-correction program is called. I wanted the art to stay true to color, and this seemed to help.

[MontrealMum]

It depends what you're doing, but scanning - even on a less-than-fancy scanner - can sometimes give you better quality than photographing as object can, especially if it's something flat like a picture. With photos you have issues of image stabilization, and do you have a tripod ? and lighting - which are hard for a non-professional to replicate. One bit of advice, it can be good to save a .tiff file as a master (which will have all the information) then edit into jpeg or gif as needed (tiffs are huge) to not compromise clarity, yet get a smaller file size. However, tiffs are very big so this depends on how much space your computer/network has and how many you have to do, you might want to do jpeg instead. Although scanning something that is b&w as b&w will cut down on file size, it might be sharper if you do it in color, then edit down file size later. Do you have Photoshop or some other editing software at your school? People I work with (conservators) use primarily photoshop, so that's what I'm familiar with, but there are others.

ETA: sorry, that was a little rambly. You're not likely to have access to the optimal equipment to do this using a camera, and usually flatbed scanners are the rule of thumb for flat, paper, or textual things anyways. Also, it will be much much faster to use a scanner - digitizing can be extremely timeconsuming, especially if you're not used to it. If you want to save file space and scan as b&w or greyscale and are familiar w/Adobe you can add color back in, and all sorts of other stuff later. But if I were doing it, I'd focus on doing it fast, so I'd scan in color. HTH.

[Coloring Pages]

Thanks a lot for posting. You have helped me get an idea on what to do as a project for my kids this summer. We haven't tried coloring as a big project though. I have seen forums discussing coloring books, apart from the very colorful books, I would be able to help enhance my kids' arts skills.