Your kid has just handed you a crayon drawing of a rainbow dragon wearing sunglasses, and now they want to enter it in the school art competition. First off, brilliant. Second, you're probably wondering how on earth you turn that masterpiece into something polished enough to submit. School art competition stickers are one of the smartest, most underrated ways to present kids' artwork, and getting there is easier than you'd think.
Why School Art Competitions Are a Big Deal for Kids
These competitions aren't just a fridge-magnet moment. For a child, having their work formally recognised, displayed, judged, celebrated, builds something real: confidence, creative identity, and the sense that their ideas matter.
Parental support is a genuine part of that experience. Helping your kid prepare and present their entry properly isn't just admin. It signals to them that their work is worth taking seriously. That message sticks long after the competition ends, regardless of the result.
Art educators widely agree that presenting artwork in a polished, finished format reinforces a child's pride and sense of ownership in their creative work. A professionally printed sticker of their drawing does exactly that, it looks deliberate, finished, and real.
From Drawing to Sticker: Turning Kids' Art Into a Competition Entry
The jump from paper drawing to printed sticker feels bigger than it is. Once you know the steps, it's a quick process.
What Counts as 'Original Artwork' for a School Competition
This is a fair question, and the short answer is: yes, it's still their work.
Digitising and printing a drawing doesn't change who created it. Your child drew it. The photograph or scan is just a copy of their original. Most school competitions care about creative originality, the idea, the composition, the marks on the page, not the format of the submission. When in doubt, check with the teacher, but converting a drawing to a printable file is standard practice in professional and educational art contexts alike.
How to Digitise Your Child's Drawing for Printing
You don't need a scanner or any special equipment. Here's a simple workflow:
- Photograph the artwork flat on a white or light surface in good natural light. Avoid flash, it creates glare and washes out colours.
- Crop and clean it up using a free app. Google PhotoScan, Snapseed, or even your phone's built-in photo editor work well. Straighten the image, boost contrast slightly, and remove any background shadows.
- Save it as a PNG or JPEG at the highest resolution your phone allows. For sticker printing, aim for at least 300 DPI at the intended print size. In plain terms: if you're printing a 10 cm sticker, the image should be at least 1,200 pixels wide. Most modern smartphones capture well above that.
- Check the file size, a file under 500 KB is often too compressed. If your PNG is a few megabytes, you're in good shape.
PNG is generally the better format for kids' artwork because it preserves sharp edges and flat colours without the compression artefacts that JPEGs can introduce.
Printing Stickers for School: What Parents Need to Know
Home-printed sticker paper is fine for a quick bookmark or a birthday card. For a competition entry or a keepsake, it falls short, inkjet prints on paper stickers fade quickly, smudge when damp, and peel at the edges within weeks.
Printing stickers for school through a professional printer is a different product entirely. The difference is material and ink.
Choosing the Right Sticker Size and Material for a Kids Art Project
Material: Vinyl is the clear winner for a custom stickers kids art project. It's flexible, water-resistant, and holds ink without fading. Vinyl stickers printed with eco-solvent inks are designed to last several years outdoors, resisting UV fading, rain, and temperature changes, so if your kid sticks their competition entry sticker on a lunchbox or it gets displayed in the school hall, it's going to hold up. For more on how that durability plays out over time, check out how long outdoor stickers actually last.
Size: For a competition entry sticker, somewhere between 10 cm and 15 cm square gives the artwork enough room to read clearly without being unwieldy. That said, some competitions specify dimensions, check the rules first. If there's no size requirement, go bigger rather than smaller. Details in kids' art deserve space.
Finish: Gloss finish makes colours pop and is the most popular choice for kids' artwork. Matte finish looks more gallery-like and reduces glare under fluorescent school lighting, both are solid options.
You can explore the full range of custom sticker printing options to get a sense of what's possible before you order.
How Personalised Art Project Stickers Make Entries Stand Out
There's a real difference between a hand-drawn entry mounted on card and the same artwork printed as a professional sticker. The sticker version looks intentional. It says someone valued this work enough to invest in it, and that impression carries weight with judges and peers alike.
Personalised art project stickers do something else, too: they give the artwork a second life. The original drawing stays home, safe. The sticker goes into the world, on a display board, a school foyer wall, a locker. Kids love seeing their work in a format that looks like "real" merchandise. It's a confidence boost that goes well beyond the competition result.
They also make genuinely lovely gifts. Grandparents, family friends, teachers, a sticker of a child's own drawing is a more personal and memorable gift than anything off a shelf.
Using a 'Be Arty' Upload Option to Print Your Kid's Design
This is where it all comes together. Wheelie Bin Stickers' Be Arty upload-your-own-artwork option is built exactly for this situation. You upload your child's drawing file, PNG or JPEG, high resolution, and get back a professionally printed vinyl sticker using the same eco-solvent ink process used across the full product range.
Here's how the process works in practice:
- Prepare your file using the steps above, photograph, clean up, save as a high-res PNG.
- Head to the Be Arty page on wheeliebinstickers.au and upload your image.
- Choose your size and finish, add it to cart, and place your order.
- Receive your finished sticker, printed and cut in Western Australia, shipped Australia-wide (free shipping over $130), and also available to families in New Zealand and the UK.
The finished product looks nothing like a home inkjet print. It's the kind of sticker that makes a kid do a double-take when they see their own drawing on it, in the best possible way.
If your child's competition deadline is coming up, don't leave it to the last minute. Get the file ready this week and upload it, the turnaround is fast, but printing to order takes time.
Beyond the Competition: Other Fun Ways Kids Can Use Custom Stickers
Kids competition stickers don't have to live and die with the competition itself. Once your child sees how good their artwork looks in sticker form, they'll want more, and honestly, that's a reasonable ask.
Here's how families are using personalised kids' stickers beyond the entry:
- School supplies: Laptops, lunchboxes, water bottles, and pencil cases all become a little more theirs with a custom sticker. And because vinyl stickers are waterproof, they survive the dishwasher and school bag chaos.
- Gifts: Print a few copies of the same design and give them to grandparents, cousins, or the teacher. It's a genuinely thoughtful, zero-effort gift that costs very little.
- Keepsakes: Drawings get lost. Stickers don't. A stuck-down vinyl version of a child's artwork from a particular age is a lovely thing to have years later.
- Decorating shared spaces: Bedroom doors, art folders, sketchbooks. Kids love claiming territory with their own designs.
If the sticker bug bites hard, there's a whole world of playful sticker designs for the whole family to explore, and for the parent whose car pick-up bag or back window needs a personality upgrade, stickers that work on more than just bins are worth a look too.
The main thing is this: your kid made something. It deserves to look great. A professionally printed sticker is one of the easiest ways to make that happen, and it'll mean a lot more to them than you might expect.
