Style combination · Contrasts

Spanish Bullfight Poster × Mexican Calendar Chromo

Both print a commissioned academic oil in quantity and add text afterwards, but the calendar gives the painting the whole sheet with a sponsor band, while the cartel keeps a full ranked programme of ring, bulls and matadors below it.

From the research on Spanish Bullfight Poster (Cartel Taurino)

Mix them and make something Spanish Bullfight Poster Mexican Calendar Chromo

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Spanish Bullfight Poster, their arrangement from Mexican Calendar Chromo, the finish from Spanish Bullfight Poster. 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.

Spanish Bullfight Poster (Cartel Taurino) Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

Type from Spanish Bullfight Poster: Eclectic mixing
Condensed display
Colour from Mexican Calendar Chromo: Full polychrome
Gradients
Form from Spanish Bullfight Poster: Naturalistic depiction
Borders & frames
Composition from Mexican Calendar Chromo: Single focal point
Illusion of depth
Surface from Spanish Bullfight Poster: Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · Spanish Bullfight Poster

Amour

Anton, standing in for Mecana (even-stroke slab serif) and heavy condensed grotesque capitals for the matadors' names, printed in black, red or blue

Text · Mexican Calendar Chromo

Mexico's give-away advertising calendars, at their height from the 1930s to the late 1960s. Printers led by Galas de México kept studios of painters, among them Jesús Helguera, Eduardo Cataño, Jorge González Camarena and Josep Renau, whose large oil paintings were printed by offset above a sponsor's name and a small calendar pad. In an idealising academic realism touched by Hollywood glamour they staged Aztec legends as melodrama, charros and chinas poblanas, saints, film stars and pin-ups, and hung all year in homes, shops and workshops.

Archivo; Mexican Calendar Chromo used The sponsor's name and address overprinted in the band left blank below the picture and Brand logotypes painted into the picture or carried on the product

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Mexican Calendar Chromo, with a counter-accent from Spanish Bullfight Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Spanish Bullfight Poster (Cartel Taurino) Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

#f0c4a8 ground · 36%
#1f4e8c ink · 14%
#c8372d accent · 18%
#dcaa34 accent · 14%
#a8693f accent · 10%
#3d8b4f accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f0c4a8;
  --ink: #1f4e8c;
  --accent-1: #c8372d;
  --accent-2: #dcaa34;
  --accent-3: #a8693f;
  --accent-4: #3d8b4f;
  --font-display: "Anton", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Spanish Bullfight Poster (Cartel Taurino): Bullfighting is a living but contested practice, opposed by animal-welfare campaigners in Spain and abroad, so borrowing its imagery for unrelated products brings that dispute with it; the painted manolas also belong to a folkloric picture of Andalusia rather than a record of it. Ruano Llopis (d. 1950), Roberto Domingo (d. 1956) and Juan Reus (d. 2003) are still in copyright in Spain, so paint new pictures in the manner rather than reprinting their motifs.

Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos): The Aztec scenes are a nationalist fantasy of the pre-Hispanic past painted by academically trained artists, several of them born or raised in Spain, not Indigenous art: do not present them as Nahua or Mexica tradition or copy their feathered costumes as if they were ethnography. The saints and the Virgin of Guadalupe are devotional images that many owners pray before, so do not parody them, and the pin-ups were painted, as a UNAM study of the Galas archive puts it, to satisfy male longing and promote the sponsors' brands, carrying old and new stereotypes of women. The paintings are still in copyright (Helguera died in 1971) and Grupo Carso holds the rights to the Galas archive, while Alta reported in 2023 that Calendarios Landin owns the rights to Helguera, so paint new pictures in the manner rather than retouching old chromos.