Your Kid's Drawing on a Shirt
A child's drawing is one of the few things people genuinely keep. Put it on a shirt and it gets worn, photographed, and eventually handed to a grandparent who will not stop talking about it.
The printing part is easy. Capturing the drawing properly is where most people lose quality, so start there.
Photographing the drawing
You do not need a scanner. A phone works fine if you do three things.
Flatten it first
Put the drawing on a table, not held up in someone's hands. If it has been on the fridge for six months and has a curl in it, press it under a book for an hour.
Shoot straight down
Hold the phone parallel to the paper, directly above the middle of the drawing. Photographing at an angle makes the page a trapezoid, and straightening that costs sharpness.
Use daylight, and watch your shadow
Near a window is ideal. The most common mistake is standing between the window and the paper so your own shadow falls across it. Move to the side.
Overhead kitchen lights tend to give the paper a yellow cast. We can correct that, but a clean start is always better.
We do not redraw it
This matters more than anything technical.
Every wobbly line, every colour chosen for reasons only a five-year-old understands, every place where they pressed too hard with the marker: that stays. We clean up the paper around the drawing, remove the background, and correct the colour so it prints true. We do not tidy up the drawing itself.
The whole point is that it looks like your child drew it, because they did.
What works especially well
- Family portraits, the kind with everyone the same height and the dog bigger than the house
- Marker and crayon, which have strong colour and clear edges
- Drawings with the child's name or age written on them, which we keep exactly as written
- A signature in the corner, which ages better than anything else on the shirt
Pencil drawings are the one thing to be careful with. Light pencil on white paper has very little contrast, and low contrast prints faintly. If the drawing is pencil, photograph it in bright daylight and send it to us before ordering so we can check.
Making it a gift
Two combinations we see over and over:
Matching sizes. The same drawing on an adult shirt and a kid's, so the artist and the parent match.
Grandparents. A crewneck sweatshirt with a grandchild's drawing is one of the few gifts that gets worn rather than shelved. Sand and Sport Grey are the colours that get chosen most for this.
Ordering
Upload the photo of the drawing when you order. We prepare the file by hand and print it to order inside the USA. Allow 3 to 7 business days to make it, then 3 to 5 business days for standard delivery.
If you are ordering for Christmas, order by December 5 with standard shipping.
