What to do with your kids' drawings (besides the fridge)

A child produces somewhere between 50 and 200 drawings a year, and most families solve it the same way: a fridge door, a drawer, and quiet guilt. The fix is a simple system — keep a little, store the best, and promote one or two a year to real wall art.

The 10-second sort

Each time a batch comes home, sort it into three piles:

• Recycle quietly. Most sheets are practice. Letting them go is normal — no archive survives keeping everything.
• Store flat. The ones with a story (first family portrait, the cat with five legs they insisted on). An A3 art folder or a labeled box, one per child per year, is enough.
• Promote. One or two pieces a year that genuinely stop you. These are the wall candidates.

What makes a drawing wall-worthy

Bold shapes, confident color, and a subject that means something read far better at 50×70 cm than careful, timid pencil work. Felt-tip and crayon print beautifully; faint pencil needs a contrast boost. If the family still smiles at it three weeks later, it passes.

Promoting one to the wall

A phone photo is all you need — our guide on photographing a drawing for printing covers light and framing in three rules. From there, turning the photo into a print means cleaning up the paper (creases, shadows, washed-out color) and choosing a format: art prints from €45, framed from €89, in sizes from 50×50 to 60×90 cm.

The result reads surprisingly like deliberate modern art — a child's unselfconscious lines, printed large in a slim frame, holds a wall better than most store-bought decor. It also makes the single most reliable grandparent gift in existence.

Keep the rest alive

For the stored pile, a yearly ritual works: each birthday, flip through the box together and let your child pick their own favorite. Rotation ideas for the in-between pieces are in our display ideas guide.