About Me

As a small business owner, I do my very best to implement sustainable business practices. I am constantly learning new ways to better my business and lower my environmental impact. I unfortunately cannot change the fact that acrylic paint is plastic, but the paintings that I create are heirlooms that aren’t headed to the landfill any time soon! I welcome kind and productive feedback to better my sustainability efforts, so feel free to reach out if you have suggestions or tips.

My sustainable practices include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Homemade paper: I make some of my own paper out of egg cartons, boxes, and junk mail. I use this paper for some of my watercolor pieces, and hope to create wedding art with it soon as well! 
• Recycling: Any paper products that cannot be made into homemade paper gets either reused, composted, or recycled. 
• Composting: I work from home and use WasteNot Composting to sustainably dispose of all food scraps and organic materials including qualifying paper products and commercially compostable materials..
• Shipping materials: I save almost every piece of packaging I receive and use this to wrap my paintings for local delivery and ship my art. We love a cute unboxing video, but I’d much rather my packages look a little wonky and be environmentally friendly than look perfect but be unsustainable.
• Leftover paint: Whenever there is paint left on my palette, I let it dry and peel it off instead of washing wet paint down the sink. (I have even been saving my paint scraps for a few years now, and I’m looking for ways I might be able to use them! Suggestions welcome). I also try to wipe off my brushes on a towel before rinsing them to reduce the paint that gets into the water.

Other efforts I am beginning to implement or working toward are:

• Energy efficient lighting. I already use many energy efficient bulbs in my home, but I am working on an inventory of all of our lightbulbs to verify this, as some are still from the previous owner of our condo. Meanwhile, I do my best to always turn lights off when I leave any room.
• Stretching more of my own canvases. I stretched my own canvas for the first time last year, and would like to move toward this option to avoid pre-stretched canvases which are typically wrapped in plastic.
• Commercially compostable protective packaging. Until recently, I have protected my watercolor art, cards, and prints using plastic sleeves. However, I found a compostable cellulose version of this product and am in the process of transitioning to that product exclusively.
• Paint water reuse. I have been experimenting with trying to filter the paint out of my paint water. While my system is quite imperfect, I think it’s better than nothing! It allows me to reuse my paint water a little longer.