How to Make A "Tile" Roof

If you looked out Greece and Rome, you would see, in many places, a sea of tile rooftops.   It was the same in ancient time.   So many of the buildings in ancient Greece and Rome, as today, had red tile roofs.


I wanted to include at least a little of this when we did Rome VBS, and I found the easiest way was just using red construction paper.   It was simple, cheap...and not unreasonably time consuming, though it would take more time for a larger area.   It was much easier than cutting up and painting paper cups or oatmeal cannisters...some of the other materials I had considered. And the matte texture of construction paper is actually close to the look of real roofing tiles.

Here is a picture of our small tile roof.  I had meant for it to go on a portion of slanted roof...but alas, it ended up getting put up straight up and down.   Still, it didn't turn out badly.

And below is a close up of how we made it...

To make the roof tiles I stapled red paper at a curve to black paper (12" x 18" for both, not 9" x 12").   If you stagger the paper you can keep going up to make more rows.

It actually would have been a little easier if I had made this more accurately, because most ancient Roman tile roofs had a flat space between each curved tile, like these ancient Roman tiles below....

Imbrex and Tegula Tiles

So an ancient tile roof would have looked a little more like this....

Picture by Wolfgang Sauber licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.



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