Four materials, chosen to outlive the drawings.
An artwork is a wood substrate, an adhesive, a seal and the paper your child drew on. Three of those we choose. The fourth is the one that has to survive, and everything else is picked around it.
Why no glass
Glass adds weight, reflection and a thing to break in transit, and it puts a hard surface between the eye and paper that is worth looking at closely. The seal does the work glass would have done: it takes the UV, it takes the dust, and it can be wiped.
It also means a large artwork can go on a wall above a cot without anyone doing the arithmetic about what happens if it comes down.
Why the age marks stay
A drawing that spent four years in a drawer has a fold, a coffee ring and a corner that somebody chewed. We stabilise what is structurally at risk and leave the rest. Cleaning it up would make a better-looking artwork and a worse object — those marks are the reason it is worth keeping rather than reprinting.
Tell us on the order form if there is something you want treated differently. It is easier to agree beforehand than to explain afterwards.
What archival actually means here
It means every material we add is chemically stable and will not attack the paper it touches: no acid, no lignin, no solvent that keeps working after it dries. It does not mean the drawing becomes permanent. Paper from a school pack in 2022 is not archival paper, and no seal makes it so.
What the artwork does is stop the deterioration that comes from handling, light and bad storage, which is nearly all of it.
Where it hangs
Anywhere out of direct sun. Not above a radiator, not in a bathroom. That is the whole care instruction, and it is the same one a museum works to.