Sketch of the day: Staying inside the lines optional.
I’ve been meaning for a long time to create a “How to dress like a Roman” colouring book for grownups (or, really, any age). I recently found the perfect paper to print it on, one that can handle pencils, markers, and even Copic-style markers without showing through or bleeding through to the other side. Here’s the inside front cover. Now I need to finish the rest of the insides.
I know that lady is probably holding a clay/wax tablet, but for the life of me it looks like she is holding a smartphone and going about her day!
Haha. I see it too, now!
Ummm…that’s actually an iCodex. The Ipsumconloquor didn’t have a flip-phone option.
Oh, and the ladies’ feet going about their business is kind of cute; very like those life-model studies of hands and feet in various poses, in case that was what you were going for…
My understanding is that most plebs would have had clothing dyed fairly cheaply, using largely vegetable-based dyes that would have been hard to fix and probably faded fairly quickly with time.
Plus clothing made prior to machine-age mass production was a valuable good and would have likely been worn as long as possible, so my guess is that you’d probably have seen many variations of “madder red” tunics or stolas, from the fresh, bright colors of newly dyed garments to softer faded colors of older clothing.
Kind of fun to try and picture what a typical forum crowd might have looked like…