The presence of binding media is considered as one of the criteria towards the identification of the technique that was employed for the completion of a wall painting. Following this, the degradation of binding media during a natural disaster is of great importance, not only for the integrity of the artifact, but also for the identification of the applied technique. Fire belongs to such disastrous events, that can be catastrophic to every artifact. In the case of wall paintings, these effects vary from surface depositions to their total collapse, always in accordance with the maximum temperature and the duration of the incident. In the framework of a first approximation step towards understanding the effects of fire, or the maximum temperatures developed over the painting layers of wall paintings, the present study is focused on the preparation of mock-ups following traditional wall painting recipes. In every case, commercially available yellow ochre was used as the pigment under study, while the painting layers were applied following the fresco and secco techniques; for the latter, egg yolk, linseed oil, gum Arabic and casein were used as the binding media. The wall painting mock-ups -and the pigment separately- both underwent an annealing protocol, representative of compartment fires. The pigment alone was studied by means of thermogravimetry (TGA), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and X-rays diffractometry (XRD), while the ground of the mock-ups was examined with FTIR and TGA, and the painting layers were observed and studied using UV-Vis spectrophotometry, towards the understanding of their macroscopic and morphological alterations.