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How to make a Roman Fresco

November 10, 2014 Ticia 8 Comments

About a month ago we spent a week completing various hands on Rome activities, one of the messiest activities was completing a Roman Fresco.

create a fresco lesson

 

What are Roman Frescos?

A Fresco is a style of art.  It is painting on wet plaster, usually onto a wall in a house or temple, but occasionally a fresco will be done on a canvas.

In Roman Frescos they are always done on walls (or at least all of the surviving ones were) and usually depicted scenes from Roman mythology or landscapes.  Mythology was more popular however.

In the buried city of Pompeii we have several examples of Frescoes that have survived intact for us to study.

create a fresco

 

Roman fresco art lesson

Supplies needed: cardboard, plaster of paris, paint brushes, paint (we tried several different types)

  1. Mix up your plaster of paris, it needs to be fairly thick, I found a 2 parts water to 3 parts plaster solution was about right.  But really it’s eyeballing how it’s mixing up.
  2. Spread it on the cardboard about 1/4 of an inch thick.  Then pass the wet mix over to your kid to start painting.
  3. Let your kids have fun painting their creation with whatever they want.

Roman fresco lesson

 

Here’s what we learned from our Roman Fresco:

  • Plaster dries quickly, so you can’t take too long agonizing over your painting.  I wonder how artists created large frescoes if the plaster dries so quickly.
  • It is hard to paint on wet plaster.  It is very difficult, much more difficult than painting on paper like we are used to.
  • Watercolors were more difficult to paint with and did not have as vibrant a color as acrylic paints had.  Though none of our paints were really very period accurate.

 

Roman fresco

Our Other Rome Activities

  • Roman Mosaic
  • Lost city of Pompeii
  • Julius Caesar unit study

Fingers crossed tonight or this afternoon I get the other pictures edited for the posts I wrote this weekend when I had no internet.  It’s amazing how much writing you can get done when you have no internet to distract you.

arts and crafts, history ancient Rome, Mystery of History 2

Comments

  1. maryanne @ mama smiles says

    November 11, 2014 at 12:10 am

    What a neat activity! I have never used plaster of Paris, but I think I need to try it!

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      November 14, 2014 at 10:10 am

      It drys very fast here, within a few minutes. I wonder if that would change in a dryer or colder climate. But almost every time we’ve used plaster of Paris it’s set within a few minutes.

  2. Claire says

    November 11, 2014 at 3:18 am

    I think (but I could be wrong) that frescos are painted a little bit at a time by painting a small area with stucco (plaster mixture) and doing your painting on that bit, then adding more stucco to the next bit and so on. That way the pressure to complete the whole picture is removed.
    I love your children’s frescos, very colourful!

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      November 14, 2014 at 10:10 am

      That does make sense.

      Thanks, I was surprised at the difference in color with the different materials we tried.

  3. Marie-Claude Leroux says

    November 13, 2014 at 8:00 pm

    You know, we’ve never tried this, it seems like an interesting art experience. (and oh, yes, the internet is incredibly distracting!)

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      November 14, 2014 at 10:12 am

      You’d probably really enjoy it.

      It’s SOOOOO distracting, one time my brother wrote a post about eliminating distractions and one of his pieces of advice was installing a Chrome addon that disabled certain websites for a period of time so you couldn’t be distracted by your email or facebook, and I think I need to give in and get that addon.

  4. Natalie PlanetSmartyPants says

    November 15, 2014 at 7:33 pm

    This is a great project! I thought that plaster needs to dry a little before painting, but it clearly worked. Cool idea for Roman studies!

    Reply
  5. Amy says

    November 17, 2014 at 6:27 am

    We did frescos a year or so ago, but only on paper =) I wasn’t brave enough to try plaster! Maybe next time around I will take your inspiration and try it!

    Reply

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Ticia Adventures in Mommydom Hi, I'm Ticia! This is the adventures of my family in life and learning. Follow along with us as we share our adventures. We're having a lot of fun and learning as we go.

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