The great Lugdunum mosaic is displayed  in the Gallo-Roman museum at the top of the Fourviere Hill above the old town of Lyon.

I took pictures of all those individual squares (there are 36 of them) in October 2021 and started reproducing their designs to create models for possible mosaics. I intend to publish one model a week this year, some will be geometric models, a lot of them inspired by this great Lugdunum mosaic. Others will be more figurative, like the one I published on Week 10, inspired by a 6th century mosaic of a Gazelle from Qasr Libya

Little by little I am building my own catalog of mosaic models. I believe antic mosaicists and painters used such catalogs like this for their patrons to chose from them patterns they liked to decorate their floors and walls, and for themselves to build the actual mosaics. I will actually use them as mosaic models.

This week I bring you the 6th Lugdunum medallion :

 

Modular design

The design of this medallion is composed of 2 different ones : A flower at the center, and an intricate border. By using such modular concepts, the antic mosaicist could use the same border with different centers and create many variations. A very convenient option to have when you need to cover a huge area with geometric shapes.

Four basic colors of Roman Mosaics

Basic colors of Roman mosaics are :

1. Black
2. White
3. Red
4. Yellow

Generally they happened in that order : If the mosaicist would use only 2 colors, they were Black and White; 3 colors, Black, White and Red; 4 colors : Black, White, Red and Yellow.

These are general rules. Most of the time, the mosaicists sourced their stones no more than 100 km around the place they would build their mosaics, so they would use whatever was available to them, Blacks tended to be dark grey, and whites were more like crema.

On this 6th medallion, like on the 4th I described 4 weeks ago, the mosaicist used a 5th color, a green  possibly sourced from the mounds of Beaujolais North West of Lyon.

The border of this medallion seems quite simple to trace with its basic 2 strands of inverted black and white stripes. I can guarantee you however, that it took me quite a while to figure out the right proportions so everything would properly fit !

I generally produce 2 drawings of each model, one in black and white and one with colors close to the original

This week I also created one to the colors of the Ukrainian flag.

How useful it is to do this kind of things, create drawings or small mosaics of Ukrainian flags. It may seem ludicrous, in view of the actual suffering endured by the Ukrainian people. What can an artist do? I am too old to fight, I doubt they would be interested in my abilities. So I just try to bring attention on the horror of this war with what I do best : mosaics.

How do you feel about this ?

You are welcome to use my drawings for your own creations

I built those drawings using the 2 pieces of software GIMP and Inkscape which you can freely download and use.

I can draw mosaics because some guys develop and maintain programs that are free to download and use. These people work hard at this because they love to share, I admire that. And I will share my drawings with you. You are free to copy and use them for any graphic project, mosaic, painting, quilting…

If you do so, it would be nice to mention their provenance, but you do not have to. I would also be glad to know how you used them !

If you need higher resolution of them, please contact me

Stay tuned for the next 31 patterns… And many more ! This is the 6th model I design after this great geometric mosaic of Lugdunum. I am also publishing models of figurative mosaics, quite a lot of them from Qasr el Libya lately

you can check on previous medallions here :

LGGM_01

LGGM_02

LGGM_03

LGGM_04

LGGM_05