About a month ago we spent a week completing various hands on Rome activities, one of the messiest activities was completing a Roman Fresco.
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.
Roman fresco art lesson
Supplies needed: cardboard, plaster of paris, paint brushes, paint (we tried several different types)
- 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.
- Spread it on the cardboard about 1/4 of an inch thick. Then pass the wet mix over to your kid to start painting.
- Let your kids have fun painting their creation with whatever they want.
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.
Our Other Rome Activities
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.
What a neat activity! I have never used plaster of Paris, but I think I need to try it!
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.
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!
That does make sense.
Thanks, I was surprised at the difference in color with the different materials we tried.
You know, we’ve never tried this, it seems like an interesting art experience. (and oh, yes, the internet is incredibly distracting!)
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.
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!
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!