Mango Yellow
Made with the leaves of the Mangifera indica
Our handmade watercolours are all available on our Etsy store.
Steeped briefly in hot water, the mango leaves gift a light yellow tea which also packs a healthy punch of mangiferin. It is a favourite to make in our studio because our studio is permeated with its sweet fragrance while preparing them.
It is also another common tree on our roadsides, with a particular big tree just a few streets away; thanks to an uncle with a very long modified fishing pole with a hook at the end, we managed to taste some mangoes from him ourselves. We also have a small tree in our garden that we routinely harvest from.
We decided to try making pigments with mango leaves after coming across a peculiar story online. Back in the 15th-century village called Monghyr in India, farmers apparently pioneered a way to manufacture strong yellow pigments from mango leaves, with the help of cows.
The discovery was based off the observation that if cows were fed a strict diet of mango leaves and water, their urine would become especially luminescent. The villagers stored the urine in terracotta pots, boiled it to a syrup over an open flame, filtered and then dried to yield the popular yellow pigment called Indian Yellow, which was sold to many European artists from the 15th to 16th century. It is interesting to note that a few famous paintings, such as Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”, were essentially coated with pigments made from cow excrement. This practice was eventually outlawed because the cows, which are still widely perceived as sacred in India, ended up extremely malnourished.
No cows were mistreated in the making of this yellow watercolour, as we can also work with the colours from the mango leaves, though we can only assume that the qualities of this yellow pigments would be different from the one made years ago.
