How to photograph a child's drawing for printing

You can print a child's drawing at poster size from a phone photo — if the photo respects three rules: flat paper, even light, full frame. Here is the two-minute version used by print shops.

1. Lay it truly flat

Put the drawing on the floor or a table and weigh the corners for thirty seconds with four glasses, books, or coins just outside the artwork. A curled corner becomes a shadowed wave in print. If the sheet has lived under a fridge magnet, press it under a stack of books overnight first.

2. Light it evenly, never directly

Daylight from a window, with the drawing beside the window rather than facing it, gives even light with no glare. The two classic mistakes:

• Overhead lamps put your phone's shadow right in the middle of the sheet.
• Flash bleaches the center and darkens the corners.

Slightly dim and even always beats bright and uneven — color can be revived later; a burned-out highlight cannot.

3. Shoot straight down, fill the frame

Hold the phone parallel to the paper — directly above, elbows locked — and get close enough that the sheet fills nearly the whole screen. Every pixel spent on the table around the drawing is resolution lost from the artwork. Take three shots and pick the sharpest.

What doesn't need to be perfect

Creases, a slightly warm color cast, a visible bit of table: all fixable. When you turn the photo into a print, the cleanup step straightens the page, evens the paper white, and brings marker colors back to life — the lines themselves stay exactly as drawn. Prints start at €45, framed at €89.

If the drawing is the gift this year — and it makes a devastatingly good grandparent gift — photograph it well once and the rest takes ten minutes.