Style combination · Pairs well

Amar Chitra Katha Comics × Indian Calendar

Borrow the calendar print's frontal, haloed deity and saturated jewel colour for a cover or a single full-page epiphany panel, and keep the pages around it to flat colour and ruled panels.

From the research on Amar Chitra Katha Comics

Mix them and make something Amar Chitra Katha Comics Indian Calendar

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Indian Calendar, their arrangement from Amar Chitra Katha Comics, the finish from Indian Calendar. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Amar Chitra Katha Comics Indian Calendar & Bazaar Art

Type from Amar Chitra Katha Comics: Hand-lettering
All caps
Colour from Amar Chitra Katha Comics: Flat fields
Full polychrome
Form from Indian Calendar: Naturalistic depiction
Abundant decoration
Composition from Amar Chitra Katha Comics: Framed panels
Sequential narrative
Surface from Indian Calendar: Gloss & highlights
Painterly brushwork

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Amar Chitra Katha Comics

Vow

Londrina Solid, standing in for Upright hand-lettered capitals (dialogue in round speech balloons, evenly spaced and drawn by hand)

Text · Indian Calendar

Mass-printed images of Hindu deities, epic scenes, saints, nationalist heroes and film stars, sold in bazaars and given away as business calendars, from the chromolithographs of the Calcutta Art Studio and Ravi Varma Press to Sivakasi offset. Frontal, idealised figures painted with academic naturalism glow against dreamy landscapes, in saturated colour with gold, haloes and ornate frames above the sponsor's name and calendar pad.

Archivo; Indian Calendar used Hand-drawn Devanagari display lettering and Hand-lettered Tamil and Bengali titles

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Amar Chitra Katha Comics, with a counter-accent from Indian Calendar. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Amar Chitra Katha Comics Indian Calendar & Bazaar Art

#f3ecd4 ground · 36%
#1e1c1a ink · 14%
#e8772e accent · 18%
#6fa3d8 accent · 14%
#c8202f accent · 10%
#b97a50 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f3ecd4;
  --ink: #1e1c1a;
  --accent-1: #e8772e;
  --accent-2: #6fa3d8;
  --accent-3: #c8202f;
  --accent-4: #b97a50;
  --font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Amar Chitra Katha Comics: The series, its covers, characters and sunburst logo belong to its publisher (Amar Chitra Katha Pvt Ltd) and its artists: draw your own figures, covers and badge, never ask an image model for an ACK title or a named artist's hand, and never present a generated page as an ACK comic. Many of its subjects are deities whom readers worship, so do not mock, crop or deface them. Scholars have criticised the series for giving heroes extremely fair skin while coding dark skin with violence, brutality and low caste, for casting Muslims as either secular heroes or zealous villains, for drawing the British as ugly caricatures, and for leaving women, Muslims and lower castes out of its history: give gods, demons, villains, Muslims, Dalit and Adivasi characters the same drawing care, never use skin colour, features or dress as markers of evil, caste or religion, draw people across the real range of South Asian skin tones rather than one pale, uniform type, and do not present one Hindu reading as the whole of India's past.

Indian Calendar & Bazaar Art: These are devotional images that many viewers worship, so do not crop, distort or deface deities or place them on footwear, floors, underwear or in mocking contexts. Many original painters went uncredited; name the artist and press where known.

The two styles

A colourful comic poster titled “The River Friends” follows four children in a rural village as they seek advice and bring their community together to build a stone check dam across a drying river. Black-bordered panels show the village, conversations with elders, collective construction, and the friends beside the restored river.

1967–present · South Asia Amar Chitra Katha Comics The Bombay comic-book series that from 1967 retold Hindu myth and epic, Buddhist and Jain tales, saints, folk legends, the jests of the court wits Birbal and Tenali Raman, and Indian history for children, in English and Indian languages, with well over 500 titles by the early 1990s. Each issue of about 32 pages tells one story, or a few short tales, in regular grids of ruled panels: brush-inked, idealised figures in flat colour, narration in tinted caption boxes, hand-lettered capitals, an iconography fixed from book to book, and a painted cover, often in the idiom of Indian calendar art. 1878–present · South Asia Indian Calendar & Bazaar Art Mass-printed images of Hindu deities, epic scenes, saints, nationalist heroes and film stars, sold in bazaars and given away as business calendars, from the chromolithographs of the Calcutta Art Studio and Ravi Varma Press to Sivakasi offset. Frontal, idealised figures painted with academic naturalism glow against dreamy landscapes, in saturated colour with gold, haloes and ornate frames above the sponsor's name and calendar pad.