The Starry Night (cropped) with the luminous moon painted using Indian Yellow. (Wikimedia Commons)
Farmer and Cow Pyrography Art wood burning
When I turned 40 my coworkers had a birthday party for me. I’m not into celebrating birthdays, especially my own, but, if nothing else, it was a day of free food at work. During the party one of my male co-workers informed me I was at a good age because I was like “a dairy cow put out to pasture.” If that wasn’t bad enough, the idiot thought that was a compliment! I tend to have a bit of a vindictive side, so when this co-worker said he’d like some pyrography art, I knew it was time for a little payback. Thus Cow Daddy was born. This blog is going to cover the creation of my pyrography Cow Daddy art I gifted to him.
You can watch a timelapse YouTube video of this artwork being created. Just click on the image to the left.
Like most of my artwork, it starts out with a pencil sketch that I burn in with the writing pen tip. I found a picture of some old farmer in rubber boots holding a pitch fork in the middle of a hay barn. I left off the head when I transferred it onto the wood and substituted Cow Daddy’s. It wasn’t a proportional match, but since this was a joke gift that will most liking will end up in the garbage, I let it be.
After burning in the trace lines I started to color and contour the work using the shading pen. Here, I’ve started working on Cow Daddy’s shirt and I shaded it in such a way as to give him a sizeable ‘beer gut.’ After all, there are consequences to calling someone a cow even if you somehow believe it’s a compliment.
The key to giving the appearance of a beer gut is the shading. Yes, this is a duh statement. I shaded the belly very similarly to how I would a round mounded hill; the top of the hill is lighter than the sides and the closer to the ground you get the darker the sides get.
Another important aspect to the large belly illusion is to also take into account light direction. In this case the light was overhead; this means the underside or bottom of things are much darker than the top. I tend to work on the darkest areas first, so this photo shows the bottom of the sleeve and the ‘underside’ of the belly burned in.
This photo shows how the ‘mound’ is lightest on the top (area still un-burned), darker on the sides, and has a very dark shadowed area at the bottom. If I had kept the shirt all uniformly colored like the old farmer source photo was, the chest/belly would look flat.
By making the ‘underside’ so much darker it really gives the impression of sizeable girth.
After the dark shadowed areas were done I started filling in the rest of the shirt.
One area I really liked, and impressed myself a little with, was how much detail I was able to put on the belt. Like the notches which were accomplished by making a small divot or hole in the wood with a sharp-pointed object like a metal pick. Then I carefully burned over the top of it with the shading pen tip.
The last area to work on was the pants and rubber boots. I liked working on the jeans because of all of the wrinkles, crease lines, or whatever you want to call them. This gave me lots of practice putting in highlights and shadows to recreate the fabric texture and worn look.
The numerous wrinkles are actually easy to do. They are just like the belly in that the top of the wrinkle is the lightest spot and the sides are darker. Also, just like the belly, the underside is darker because of the lighting.
Below are some progress photos of the pants being burned in.
How cow urine from India found itself in van Gogh’s paintings
Written by Vandana Kalra
New Delhi | Updated: May 22, 2023 19:03 IST
The Starry Night (cropped) with the luminous moon painted using Indian Yellow. (Wikimedia Commons)
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How cow urine from India found itself in van Gogh’s paintings
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Painted on a summer night of 1889 by Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night is one of the most recognised paintings in the world, depicting the dreamy star-filled night sky that appeared before van Gogh from the window of his asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence
While the original painting is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Delhi’s art aficionados have been treated to the Dutch post impressionist’s work in the ongoing exhibition titled “Van Gogh 360°”. Art lovers can now literally step into a magnified version of van Gogh’s work, with large projectors creating an immersive and intimate experience.
Interestingly, the yellow that Van Gogh used to paint the radiant moon in The Starry Night had travelled all the way from India. Named Indian Yellow, the shade was popular across Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, and The Starry Night is considered to be among the last masterpieces to have used it, before its production was outlawed in India.
We look at its history, origin and popularity.
Produced using cow urine
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Known for its radiant and deep orange-yellow hue, it is believed that though artists in the West had been using Indian Yellow for centuries, they were unaware of its ingredients.
Its popularity, though, is evident from the fact that it found a mention in several notable publications. French writer-painter JFL Mérimée wrote in The Art of Painting in Oil and in Fresco (1839) that “the colouring matter is extracted from a tree, or a large shrub called Memecylon tinctorium … (which had) a smell like cows’ urine”, describing the colour as “a brilliant yellow lake”.
However, it was years later that British botanist Sir Joseph Hooker attempted to discover the details of the ingredients that made Indian Yellow. He reportedly wrote a letter to the Indian Department of Revenue and Agriculture find out. Hooker’s letter was responed to by TN Mukharji, author-curator and public servant.
Mukherji wrote that he had travelled to Mirzapur, Bengal, and observed that the colour came from the urine of cows that were given a special diet of mango leaves and water, occasionally mixed with turmeric, to get a bright yellow urine. The urine would be collected in earthen pots and placed over fire nightlong to attain a more condensed liquid, which was then strained and hand-pressed into sediment balls that were further dried in the heat. The piuris reached Europe through merchants sailing from Kolkata.
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A report published on Sciencedirect.com in 2019 confirmed Mukharji’s analyses. Researchers wrote: “All the materials were shown to contain variable ratios of reported components of Indian yellow (euxanthic acid, euxanthone, and a sulfo-derivative of euxanthone), and some presented hippuric acid, a ruminant metabolite found in urine.”
Use in India and the West
The colour was widely used in India since the 15th century and is seen in traditional Mithila paintings of Bihar as well as Pahari and Mughal miniatures in the 16th to 19th centuries. According to reports, a yellow pigment called gorocana, also believed to have been made from cow’s urine, was also used for several rituals in India and also applied as tilak.
The Starry Night in the Van Gogh 360 exhibition. (Express Photo by Saumya Rastogi)
In the West, several artists took a liking for the colour that was supplied in the form of “chalky spheres” in Europe and had to be merely mixed with a binding agent to create paint. Its use was prominent as early as the 1700s, when artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds used it in works such as The Age of Innocence (1788). The colour was also extensively used by JMW Turner in his oil and watercolours, and works such as The Angel Standing in the Sun (1846). The light emanating from the lanterns in John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885-86), was also painted using Indian Yellow.
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Dutch painters like Jan Vermeer and van Gogh specifically admired it for its luminosity – something that can be seen in its use in The Starry Night.
Banning the colour
Though there is no concrete written evidence to suggest specific reasons, animal cruelty during the process of procuring the colour eventually led to a ban on its production in the early 1900s. The dehydrated cows “looked very unhealthy”, Mukharji had noted in his communication with Hooker.
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In addition, scientists have pointed out that mango leaves are known to contain the toxin urushiol, which would also take a toll on the bovine animal’s health.
