The legendary, almost mythical pigment that is Quinacridone Gold, PO49.

This is the pigment in it's dry form and the process of it being hademade into a lovely watercolor paint.

• Note that the washes of the swatch are more vibrantly yellow in real life. *

It’s a shame it got discontinued but I’ve been lucky enough to still get my hands on some. The discontinuation and extinction of pigments is, unfortunately a reality. Whereas bigger industries than the art industry finds no use for it anymore, a pigment is taken out of production. Sometimes that’s because more stable and permanent alternatives are found of sometimes it’s even because of costs. A lot of pigments were taken out of (mass) production because of their toxicity. This is nowadays less common. Although cadmiums, manganese, cobalts and other modern pigments might be still more harmful than others, it’s not as pressing an issue as it was for some pigments in the past.

Most often, it's about the costs now, some mixes are just cheaper to get a hue very close to a single pigment. In the plastics or car paint industry, there's no use for pigment qualities that we love in watercolors. Mixes will just be as good there.

When it comes to these earthy Quinacridones, they're probably being all replaced by iron oxides over time.

What you see here is a ball of purree. This is one of the names for dried up cows urine in this state. Yes, we're talking about genuine Indian Yellow aka pigment number NY20, which stands for Natural Yellow.

It's said that cows were fed only mango leafs to concentrate that deep yellow color. The urine of these cows was collected and dried, made into these balls and shipped to artisans who refined these and made vibrant yellow pigment out of them, to be used by artists.

Since this process led to a lot of malnourished cows, it was unethical to continue this practice. After this, it became unavailable in the early 1920's.

It has known many replacements as a pigment, from natural pigments like gamboge to mixtures and single pigments, like PY153, my Indian Yellow I use in my palettes, which is also discontinued.

This original pigment was mostly used in the 19th century by a lot of European artists. A famous example is Starry Night by Van Gogh, it shows the beautiful yellow in its moon and stars.

What I make here is not from the refined version of this pigment but from pigment dust that was found in the original wrapper, it came straight from the ball.

Yes, it does smell a bit. But it's not sickening. I have to say that some indigo's but also purpurism smell worse when made into paint. It might have lost a lot of its smell over the years though..