Kids Self Portrait Art

Every year, my kids draw a self portrait of themselves at school, that gets turned in to a tea towel as a fund raiser.  

I buy loads every year.  For the grandparents, and for us to use.  I have also kept clean ones for each year for the kids to put in their memory trunks.  This sounds grand memory cardboard box is more the reality.

My son is now in his final year of primary school, so I have his full school year in tea towels.

A good friend of mine, who has kids at the same school as mine, had a birthday recently.

As a birthday gift, I took all the pictures of her kids from the tea towels and put them on one picture.  It is so cute to see how the kids drawing skills develop, but their view of themselves doesn't change that much.


Most schools in the UK seem to do this type of project, and as it invoves photoshoping the images, you can edit out the bolognese or other unidentifiable stains if you have been using the towels, and they are a bit grubby.  I didnt have towels from 2004 or 2005, as my son hadn't started school then, but I managed to get from other friends who had kids in those years.

(As an alternative..... you could get your children to draw themselves every year...but I would definitely have forgotten to do that.)

This was a really easy project.  All I needed was the tea towels, a scanner, basic photo editing package, powerpoint and a frame to put the masterpiece in!



1)  Iron the tea towels to get as many wrinkles out as possible, then scan the relevant section, and save to your printer.

2)  I use a package called pixelmator to edit the photos.  I "cut" a separate picture for each child for each year, and saved them.

3) Clean up each picture to remove the weave effect, and any marks you dont want.  I actually created an extra "layer"as it was a lot less time consuming than taking every weave mark out.

I made a template on powerpoint, with all the dates and and school years. (I had the school name and family name on the picture too, but have removed for this post).  Simply resize the pictures to fit, line them up on powerpoint, and print.

I framed this for my friends birthday.  It went down really well.

Her youngest daughter Charlotte was concerned that she only goes up to year 3, but I can easily add her each year until she graduates.

I am planning to do these for all my sons best friends (well their mums anyway) as school leaving presents in July.  (And for Abbis friends 2 years after).

I think this would make a great fathers day gift, or a present for a grandparent.