The Fresco Club

At long last I have joined the ranks of Michelangelo and many others as a member of the official fresco club. Ok, so maybe I made that up, but I guess the point I'm getting at is that Michelangelo and I now have one more thing in common than we used to: we have both painted a fresco. His might have been on the Sistine Chapel's ceiling, while mine was on an 8x11 board, but still, it's the same process. Luckily I didn't have to lie on my back to paint mine.

So here is how fresco painting works. Rather than using a binder like oil to make the paint stick, fresco uses the carbonization of lime. The pigment becomes part of the limestone as it hardens. This makes for a rather important time restraint. Once the plaster is dry, you can't paint on it anymore.

We had to build up three layers of different coarsnesses of this limestone goup. Here I am applying the top coat, which is the finest of the three:

You might think it would be easy to go from that to what is pictured below, but it wasn't. The goup just did not want to stick, but in the end I conqured it into submission.

Once the plaster was all smoth, we had to wait about 20 minutes before painting on it. Our professor had told us to shy away from complicated human figures in our first fresco as it is a very unforgiving and different way of painting, especially compared to the oil paintings we had just been workingon. This was the photo I decided to use as my inspiration:

And here is my final product, you'll notice I took a few artistic liberties.

Here is a side view where you can see the different layers that we built up to paint on:

What I learned from painting my first fresco was that Michelangelo and the rest of the clube members were true masters at what they did. I can't imagine painting a human figure, especially on a ceiling or even on a large scale. But I did enjoy making my tiny fresco and understanding more about the process past artists went through.

Oh, and the best thing? This fresco will last basically forever. It will even continue to brighten for several years to come.