Pyrrha's
Roman
Pages

title page

meet Pyrrha

mosaic making

Roman gardening

Bignor villa

Roman tombstones

Roman inscriptions

Latin poetry

Latin language

Spoken Latin

Harry Potter Latin Quiz

Classical Computers Quiz

Classical Face Quiz

links to other sites

[the real Medusa!]

mosaic making
gluing the tesserae

[Me sticking the first pieces onto the face] This is me using children's water-soluble glue to stick the tesserae face-down onto the paper. (The paper will be soaked away from the top of the design when the mosaic is reversed and laid outside.)

Here I am working on the line of the nose and the mouth. It was difficult to assess what the final effect would be because the marble did not have such a strong colour on its unpolished surfaces.

[snaky hair!]
The face and hair look good now, and we have added our initials - A M D - just in case anyone in the future thinks they have found a genuine Roman mosaic!

We used tile-cutters to shape the tesserae when necessary, and found that it was safer to hold the marble and cutters inside a small plastic bag so that we were not hit by flying pieces.


[Malcolm finishing the guilloche]


Several weeks later (we only worked for about an hour at a time because the bending and mosaic dust were not very pleasant in larger doses) Malcolm is finishing off the border.


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