Student paints a more environmentally-friendly future
Claire Lee at South Fraser Regional Science Fair. Photo by: Hwan Lee
By Patricia Lane & Claire Lee
Claire Lee is painting a safer future. This 16-year-old high school student from Surrey, British Columbia, invented a recipe for high-quality, non-toxic, plant-friendly watercolour paints. Her Eco-Palette project is already helping to reduce waste in the art world. She is a 2025 winner of the I-SEA National Youth Climate Action Award.
Tell us about your project.
I started art lessons when I was five, and it quickly became my passion. Every Wednesday after school, I’d go to art school and spend a couple of hours painting images of the natural world and the impact of the changing climate. During these classes, we often worked with watercolours because of their fluidity and versatility, but many commercially available watercolour palettes contain harmful chemicals and litres of wastewater are thrown down the drain after each class. I have been aware of widespread water use restrictions since I was very young, and this failure to conserve really troubled me.
When I was 14 and searching for a science fair project, I found a way to mix watercolour paints from plant- and earth-based materials that were high quality but could also allow the leftover water to be non-toxic to both artists and the environment.