How to Export Your Child's Artwork as PDF from pairPaint

What is the point of exporting then? Your canvas already has autosave

First, some good news: pairPaint is an online paint app that saves automatically. Every stroke your child makes is stored in the browser, so a closed tab, a dead battery, or a Chromebook that restarts overnight will not wipe out their masterpiece. The drawing is waiting right where they left it when they open the page again.

But autosave lives inside the browser — it is not a file you can print, email to grandma, or stick on the fridge. Exporting turns the drawing into a real file that exists outside the app. It is the difference between "saved on this device" and "saved forever, anywhere." A printed page on the kitchen wall is the whole point of kid art, after all.

How to export: the one-button method

Exporting takes about three seconds:

• Open the save menu — tap the download/save button in the toolbar (the one labeled "Save — choose PNG or PDF").
• Pick your format — "PNG picture" for a single image, or "PDF document" for a print-ready file.
• Download — the file lands in your device's downloads folder, ready to print, share, or archive.

That is the entire process. No account, no email sign-up, no "create a free trial to unlock exports." Everything in pairPaint is free, and the file is made right on your device — your child's drawing never travels to a server just to become a PDF.

PDF or PNG — what would you like?

Both formats come from the same save menu, and choosing is easy once you know what each is for:

• PNG picture — a single image file. Best for sharing on WhatsApp, posting to the class group chat, or setting your child's drawing as the phone wallpaper. Crisp colors, small file, works everywhere images work.
• PDF document — a print-ready document. Best for the printer, for sending a finished piece to school, or for keeping a permanent copy. The PDF matches true A4 paper size, so printing is predictable — no squashed margins or cropped edges.

Rule of thumb: screen → PNG, paper → PDF. If anyone will press "print" on it, export the PDF.

Multi-page drawings: export all at once

Kids do not stop at one page. A comic strip has four pages, a birthday card has an inside and an outside, a school project might have a title page and three pages of diagrams. Exporting each page separately and renaming six files is the kind of chore that kills the fun.

Use "Export all (PDF)" instead. It packs every page of the current drawing into a single PDF file — one true-A4 sheet per page, in order, ready to print as a little booklet. Teachers love this for collecting an entire class project: instead of 30 separate files, you get one document per student that prints cleanly on any school printer.

A useful tip for printing: draw within the A4 page border

Here is the detail that makes pairPaint's PDF export genuinely useful instead of merely convenient: the canvas has a true-A4 page canvas. When you draw inside the page border, the PDF export produces an actual A4 sheet — same proportions, same margins — so what you see on the page is exactly what comes out of the printer.

• Portrait or landscape — pick the orientation in page settings before you start (or switch mid-drawing).
• Add more pages — the "Add page" button gives your child a fresh sheet without losing the first one; the multi-page PDF export collects them all.
• Delete a dud page — tap "Delete this page" and confirm. No ripped paper, no starting over.
• Paper patterns — ruled lines, graph grid, dot grid, or numbered grid print as they appear, which makes the PDF handy for math homework sheets and lined writing practice too.

If your child loves coloring pages, pair the bucket fill tool with the PDF export: they can color a whole stack of outlines, then print them as a bound coloring book. And when the printer is out of pages, freekidworksheets.com has free printable coloring worksheets ready to download — the same kind of kid-friendly line art that works beautifully as pairPaint coloring pages.

Five export habits worth teaching your child

Exporting is a three-second habit, but a few small routines make it part of creative play instead of a chore:

• Name it together — after the download, rename the file ("aaryan-dinosaur-oct-9.pdf"). Future you will be grateful.
• Export before big experiments — about to try a wild new idea on a finished drawing? Save a PNG first. Undo goes far back, but a file is forever.
• Fridge test — print one drawing a week. Kids draw more when they see their work on the wall, not just on a screen.
• The grandparent file — keep one folder of PDFs per school year. Come June, you have a portfolio without trying.
• Check the page count — if your child added pages they forgot about, "Export all" includes them. Skim the PDF once before printing twenty copies for the class.

Teacher tips: PDFs in the classroom

For teachers, the PDF export is really a grading and record-keeping tool. Run a live drawing room in pairPaint — creator mode gives every student their own canvas while you watch thumbnails update — and at the end of the lesson, collect the whole class's work with the "Download PDF" option: one PDF per student, true-A4, prints cleanly on the school printer with zero reformatting.

Use it for exit tickets (draw what you learned, export, hand in), vocabulary illustrations, math story pages on the numbered grid, or a weekly art journal that you assemble into a class book at the end of term. Because the export happens on each device, no student work passes through your account — a nice privacy bonus in a classroom full of minors.

Frequently asked questions