Nature & Sustainability
There is an art to sustainability. Currently, these days, we are hurting our planet and wildlife all around us. Sustainability is the art of trying to take back those actions that we’ve done by transforming the way we live. Every small change matters. Our Earth is suffering and we need to help fix that.
Making Paints
Natural paints allow you to make paints without hurting the environment. This year, I have only just started creating my own pigments and paints with the help of a mentor who is a natural artist featured at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Together, we meet to identify new methods for making paint from our natural world.
Making natural paint is fairly simple. All you need is pigment and binder. For watercolor, the binder is usually a mixture of gum arabic which is a tree product, water, and glycerin. Pigments can be made from almost anything however natural pigments usually come from rocks but some can be made from things like egg shells and also precipitating a dye from plants which creates a pigment known as a lake pigment.
I have used my deep interest in geology to support pigment making by using some rocks from my mineral collection to crush up and make pigment from them. I can then mix the pigment with the binder and paint beautiful pictures.
When grinding pigment, you use a device called a mortar and pestle which chops the rocks into a powder. You want to get the powder finer than flour in order to use it as paint.
Once you have ground the rock to a flour texture, you will pass it through a very fine mesh strainer. Then, you will put the pigment in water and all of the sand, silt, and everything you don’t want will settle to the bottom of the water. The pigment will stay suspended within the water. Pour out the pigment into a jar and wait for the pigment to settle to the bottom of that jar. The powder you see at the bottom is what you want to keep. Pour out the excess water and wait for the pigment to dry. Then, scrape it off the bottom of the jar and grind it again in the mortar and pestle. You will not need to pass it through a strainer this time, it will grind very easily and then you can store your pigment in a jar until you are ready to make paint.
I designed a custom watercolor pan set for the handmade natural pigments and 3d printed the case.
The E&N brand was created to mark all of the natural pigment products created by me or with the help of my mentor.
Breaking News! E&N has introduced a brand new blue color, known as cabbage blue. It is made from precipitating dye from red cabbage. It is currently in the drying phase but it will be available soon.
Climate Combatant
I wrote a letter to President Joe Biden to help climate change by taking action myself. Read the letter and view the poster image I created below.
Dear President Joe Biden,
My name is E and I am an 8.5 year old innovator and entrepreur that believes in sustainability. I am very concerned about the pollution and plasitc in our world. I recently learned that stopping plastic and pollution can stop some cancers.
Could you help stop all sorts of pollution and help stop plastic? I hope that this design I made will help spread the word.
By the way, my website is ercInnovations.com. I hope you will check it out for more ideas.
Sincerely yours,
E
Bisonblotcha 2
To continue on the innovation of the Bisonblotcha, we decided to continue refine the pencil tip to make it more stable in writing. Our strategy was to use coconut graphite instead of the beeswax for the pencil tip. We also laser engraved the brand logo on the side of the Bisonblotcha 2. Overall the improvements succeeded but we will continue to refine the junction of the pencil case to the tip.
Bisonblotcha 1
We felt like we should reinvent the pencil to make it more eco-friendly. I decided to make this because pencils involved cutting down trees to make their wood case and factories for their fabrication which leverage nonrenewable resources. My goal was to create an eco-friendly pencil from the natural resources available at my own home. This concept was a collaboration with another innovator. It was then fabricated at my home using bamboo, beeswax, and paprika to make the natural pigments.
Making a Bisonblotcha
In the end, I produced a bamboo pencil infused with beeswax mixed with paprika to produce a red wax-like mark on the paper. I was pleased to find that the bamboo pencil was easily sharpened using a standard pencil sharpener. To watch the process of making a Bisonblotcha yourself, see the video below.