Printer News

Canon Creative Park Review

Jon Sienkiewicz | Apr 25, 2019

Use your inkjet printer to create 3D toys, stunning calendars, scrapbook pages, holiday cards, hanging decorations, reproductions of famous artwork and much, much more. Canon’s Creative Park offers an outstanding collection of templates and activities—complete with detailed instructions—and no, you don’t have to own a Canon brand printer. With Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Proms and Graduations rapidly approaching, here’s your chance to create personalized cards and gifts using your shareable digital images.

You gotta hand it to Canon. It must cost a small fortune to maintain Canon Creative Park, a very user friendly website that is beyond a doubt the best collection of creative printer resources in the industry.

The website is super-simple to navigate. The top nav bar has six tabs. They’re labeled Card, Paper Craft, Home and Living, Scrapbook, Art, Calendars and Famous Paintings. These titles are self-explanatory.

Under the Paper Craft tab you’ll find these subs: Animals, Toys, Educational, Vehicles, Science, Architecture, Decorative, Event and Latin flavor.

Each subcategory contains multiple project templates and instructions that you can download for free. You do not have to own a Canon printer, but if you do you can access and utilize the special enhanced content that’s found in Canon Creative Park Premium.

Customers who have Canon printer models that support premium contents can download and unlock exclusive printing materials via the Quick Menu or My Image Garden application supplied with their printer. To use this service, make sure that genuine Canon ink cartridges are installed for all colors on a supported printer.

Each tab has a dropdown menu. The Home and Living menu, for example, consists of the following subcategories: Hanging Decoration, Wall Decorations, Ornaments/Accessories, Garlands, Plants, Boxes/Cases, Pattern Papers, Bags and Fans.

Some projects require a bit of patience and dexterity, as you might imagine. But most are straightforward and quite doable. You’ll even find coloring pages for the kids in your crew. Some of the coloring pages are intricate and amazing.

For what it’s worth, my family has been driving a Canon PIXMA MG6120 inkjet printer for about nine years now. It’s not Canon’s latest or fastest, but it won’t break and it delivers awesome output. The MG in the model number doesn’t stand for “Mighty Good” but it could.

One of the more intriguing projects: 3D paper sculptures based on the work of 18th century Japanese artist Ito Jakuchu.

Fresh content is added to Canon Creative Park on a regular basis. This spring, Canon added projects twice in March and twice in April (a total of 48 new things like light switch decals and smartphone stickers). New items are earmarked so you can keep tabs on the latest. If you don’t see anything you like (which would be hard to believe) check back later to see some new stuff.