Interested in greening your studio and live in Australia? You’re in luck, Green Energy Watch is giving away 2 free lightbulbs per household… hurry before they run out!

After an overwhelmingly successfull Earth Hour ‘08, it’s exciting to think of what could be in store for Earth Hour ‘09, to be held on March 28th at 8pm everywhere! 58% of adults in Australia’s capital cities participating in Earth Hour this was quite impressive, with many coming up with fun ideas for how to spend Earth Hour with their families. I think my favourite idea was two young boys who formed “Earth Hour Police” and went door-to-door asking their neighbours to shut off their lights. I wonder if they wore special badges :) Maybe next year I’ll do some Art In The Dark!

It seems that everywhere you turn, products and businesses are going (or claiming to go) “green.” Among the ambiguous buzz words is “zero waste,” which implies that your product or service creates no waste from its infancy to death… it is created from renewable materials and is able to be reused or recycled, avoiding landfill.

But how realistic is it for an office (or art studio!) to create zero waste? The GreenBiz article, The Zero Waste Office : Is it possible?, addresses that question, and gives some great achievable goals that we designers & illustrators can adopt into running our own green creative studios :

“At this time zero waste is more of a journey than something that can be achieved,” said Larry Chalfan of the Zero Waste Alliance, a non-profit consortium of educational, government, business and other groups. “Too much of the things we need simply aren’t ready for us to truly be zero waste. That said, a lot can be done, and many organizations make the goal ‘zero waste to landfill’ and then further define it to mean over 90 percent of waste being diverted into reuse or recycling.”

For more info on how to be a greener designer, check out these other tips & posts on my blog!

I managed to sqeeze in 20 minutes of sketching from the couch yesterday for SketchCrawl 18, while holding my 6-week old daughter. Sketching babies is one of those things you have to do really loosely… they just wriggle around too much to get too focused on the details, so quick gestural drawings are all I really had time to do. Was fun though, will be keeping my sketchbook closeby to do more scribbles of her cuteness.

Be sure to check out some of the fabulous sketches up on the SketchCrawl forum, such as the one above by Marc Taro.

We also had a nice time for Earth Hour last night… hung around with family and chatted in candlelight for my birthday. Was kind of fun not having the lights on, with the occasional cheeky comment from brother-in-laws about the fridge light being on whenever someone went for a snack!

This Saturday, March 29th, aside from celebrating my 28th birthday, I’ll be satisfying my creative and green sides by participating in SketchCrawl 18, followed by playing a game of Settlers of Catan by candlelight during Earth Hour from 8pm-9pm.

Earth Hour is an event set up by the WWF, where they’ve encouraged thousands of people worldwide to turn off their lights for one hour to increase awareness of the need for action to act against global warming. Just switch your lights off between 8pm-9pm your time… and if you’re really enthusiastic, switch all electrical appliances off, too. Then take a moonlit walk outside and watch the stars with friends, or just take a catnap for an hour. For more details check out the Earth Hour website. (They’ve got a cool web-banner in which your name floats by once you’ve signed up, ta-hee!)

SketchCrawl 18 is basically the artist version of a pub crawl… meet up with a bunch of friends / artists, and sketch like crazy all day! Combine it with some good food (or even with a pub crawl!) and unique locations to visit, then visit the Sketch Crawl forum to share your sketches! Our sketches will be up on my blog as well as on the SketchCrawl forum under Adelaide.

Another down-to-earth way to be responsible for the products we purchase: Eco-Libris encourages avid book lovers to donate $1 for each book they purchase, which will go towards planting trees to offset the consumed paper. You even get a nifty recycled sticker to put inside your book to boast it’s new green qualities.

While book publishers are starting to print books with more recycled & FSC-certified content, they are still a far cry from making books sustainable, which means the books we purchase & love are still not as “green” as they can be. While many other companies are going paperless, the book publishing industry depends on paper consumption as alternative resources are still too expensive for their bottom line. The more book lovers are concerned & aware of the impact the publishing industry has on their environment, the more pressure it will put on them to make changes towards sustainable books.

So booklovers, think of putting a little something back in the ground for the little something that was taken out to make your book. Check out Eco-Libris and donate to plant trees for each of your favourite books… or go all-out and make your home library greener! Buy a few extra stickers to stick in the books you give to your family & friends.

Illustrators & Authors can take it a step further… consider buying stickers to give out at your next book signing. Or check out Eco-Libris’ Publishers & Authors program to find out how you can print Eco-Libris’ logo on the cover of your upcoming picturebook!

Environment Canada’s new website has a regularly updated list of rebates for going green by offering rebates & incentives on everything green from free energy saving lightbulbs to money back for monthly transit passes, making it that little bit easier to run a green illustration or design business.

The New Yorker has an interesting article on how homes have adopted the “paperless” mentality much faster than businesses have. I know this is true for me at home, which includes my art studio… I use an online phonebook, don’t print out my emails, download my bills as PDFs, do my banking online, create backups for digital files online rather than printing them out…
But the article reports that while homes have adopted a paperless mentality, they are also starting to use more energy with the increasing use of their electronic devices (computers, scanners, printers, digital cameras…) It brings up a good point to consider for the home-based art studio… while you have gone paperless, have you increased your energy use as a result? Are there ways you can reduce your increased energy use? (Such as unplugging electrical equipment when it’s not in use.) I’ve posted some ideas in my Green Tips for Designers & Illustrators… if you have any more ideas let me know!!!

I was stoked yesterday to pass a calendar stand selling off stock for half price, and scored by finding Danny Seo’s new eco-daily calendar “Do Just One Thing.” Part of my daily blog intake is checking out Danny Seo’s blog, Simply Green… I just love his down-to-earth approach to greener living (and decorating!) Danny’s daily calendar is no different, with each new day sporting tips for greening your lifestyle. It’s thoughtfully printed on recycled paper & on a recyclable stand… even the backs of each page are printed with lines for Notes, so you can reuse the pages before you recycle them. So if you’re shopping for an ‘08 calendar, I’d recommend this one!

I just loved this environmentally flavoured Christmas greeting I received a couple days ago via email from Greg Holfeld (another Canadian illustrator living in Adelaide)… and had to share!