Style combination · Pairs well

Literatura de Cordel Woodcut × Rorke's Drift Linocut

Two traditions of small black relief pictures of devotional and popular stories; add cordel's letterpress title block when a banded Rorke's Drift-style narrative must sit on a booklet cover.

From the research on Rorke's Drift Linocut

Mix them and make something Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Rorke's Drift Linocut

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut, their arrangement from Rorke's Drift Linocut, the finish from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut. 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.

Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Rorke's Drift Linocut

Type from Rorke's Drift Linocut: Hand-lettering
Colour from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut: Monochrome
Flat fields
Form from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut: Stylised figuration
Distortion & exaggeration
Composition from Rorke's Drift Linocut: Horror vacui
Sequential narrative
Surface from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut: Carved line
Paper & letterpress bite

The type

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

Display · Rorke's Drift Linocut

Vow

Agbalumo; Rorke's Drift Linocut used Hand-cut title in the block and Hand-cut captions and slogans

Text · Literatura de Cordel Woodcut

The cover art of Brazil's literatura de cordel, pocket chapbooks of verse whose single picture is a small woodcut cut in soft umburana wood and printed in black above a plain letterpress title. Woodcuts displaced worn zinc clichés of film-star photographs from the 1940s, led by José Bernardo da Silva's Tipografia São Francisco in Juazeiro do Norte. From the 1960s collectors and galleries turned the blocks into standalone prints by masters such as J. Borges.

Libre Caslon Text; Literatura de Cordel Woodcut used Jobbing letterpress types from the print shop's case, for titles and verse and Lettering carved into the woodblock

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut, with a counter-accent from Rorke's Drift Linocut. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Rorke's Drift Linocut

#ece4cf ground · 36%
#141414 ink · 14%
#e8c95a accent · 18%
#b33a2e accent · 14%
#d98a9e accent · 10%
#7fae8a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ece4cf;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #e8c95a;
  --accent-2: #b33a2e;
  --accent-3: #d98a9e;
  --accent-4: #7fae8a;
  --font-display: "Agbalumo", cursive;
  --font-text: "Libre Caslon Text", serif;
}

Use it with care

Rorke's Drift Linocut: These prints are the work of named Black South African and Namibian artists, many still in copyright with the artists or their estates, made under apartheid at a Lutheran mission centre. Rankin and Hobbs call the 'typical' Rorke's Drift print a construct that the market pushed artists to comply with; the centre also made etchings, aquatints, colour relief prints and screenprints, so treat this banded black-and-white linocut as one face of a diverse school, not the whole of it. Borrow the system (hand-cut black-and-white relief, banded narrative, words in the block), not a particular print, a named artist's figures or Muafangejo's lettering hand. Do not label generated work 'naive' or 'tribal' African art: when Clement Greenberg judged Art South Africa Today in 1975, Rorke's Drift artists were displayed in a 'catch all' section for representational and 'naive' works. Do not invent Zulu or Kwanyama ritual, Christian scenes or struggle martyrs as decoration: picture the subject the brief supplies in its own community's terms. Never add an artist's signature, edition number or a Rorke's Drift or ELC inscription to generated work, and never present a generated image as a Rorke's Drift print.