Children’s books exist to help young ones learn about the world around them and to see themselves. A trend in this genre is to literally let your kids see themselves in those pages! In other words, the story is by them or about them and their real adventures. With MyCanvas, you can use our Project Editor to create your own, completely custom book for your family!
Illustrated Children’s Books
If you’re an illustrator, you can create your own spreads for every page! Just follow these steps:
- Choose a book size and create a template for your pages based off that size.
- Remember to include bleeds and gutters in your page spread templates! These elements don’t show up in our Project Editor.
- Export your spreads as JPEG files.
- Upload spreads into your MyCanvas photo library in the Project Editor.
- Drag and drop spreads onto each page and adjust until it fits as desired.
Remember, our minimum page count is 18, but the base price of a book is for 20 pages.
Draw Your Own
Let your children illustrate their own stories! This is a fun way to capture their early art and creativity. You’ll also be able to capture the stories they want to tell.
Whether you make this a project or use an existing story, scan each of their finished drawings into your computer. Then, after saving them as JPEG files, follow the same steps as above. Make sure that your images are at least 8″ x 10″ to fit on the Project Editor pages without losing the image quality. You can choose to keep their handwriting, but you may find it useful to create text boxes to tell the story or transcribe it for later reading.
Stories Through Photos
Don’t want to illustrate every spread? You can tell a magical story with your kids as the heroes of their own adventures! Let them dress up and grab some candid photos while they play. This can be a fun way to capture dialogue and to participate in playing pretend with your children.
Another way to illustrate a story through photos is to take pictures of their toys and setting. Capture the stories they’re telling with their favorite toys, in the vein of Toy Story or The Lego Movie.
You can tell the real-life stories, too. Share easy-to-read stories and memories of growing up, school, summer, and best friends. These, along with photos, can make great heirlooms as well as fun stories for your family.
Tell your children’s stories with MyCanvas this year! What stories can you tell by or about your younger family members?
