title. Natural Colours
date. March - October 2016
city. Ho Chi Minh
​
My childhood interest in natural colours intensified as I started researching into Vietnam's ancient art of woodblock printing in order to make a DIY woodblock printmaking kit. I wanted to know how artisans came up with five signature colours: brownish red, green, yellow, white and black, using only naturally obtained materials. Apart from investigating traditional sources of natural dyes used by printmaking artisans in Dong Ho village, I also experimented with edible and medicinal plants, hoping to identify new pigments that could be incorporated into my kit.
​
The process of extracting colours from those plants include boiling, straining and spray-drying. I found lá cẩm (Peristrophe roxburghiana), a plant traditionally used only for colouring rice, to be an abundant and stable source of violet pigment.
A light-green, light-sensitive pigment derived from rau ngót, a common green leafy plant used for making soup.
A yellow pigment derived from
seeds of gardenia jasminoides flowers, sometimes used to make sticky rice yellow.
A violet pigment derived from lá cẩm, a leafy plant traditionally used to colour rice purple.