Style combination · Contrasts

Egyptian Painted Film Poster × Mexican Calendar Chromo

Both paint the stars of a national cinema's golden age, but the Egyptian poster collages star heads under huge calligraphic titles, while the chromo paints one unified scene and keeps its lettering to a small band below.

From the research on Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

Mix them and make something Egyptian Painted Film Poster Mexican Calendar Chromo

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Mexican Calendar Chromo, their arrangement from Egyptian Painted Film Poster, the finish from Egyptian Painted Film 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.

Egyptian Painted Film Poster Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

Type from Egyptian Painted Film Poster: Brush & pen calligraphy
Hand-lettering
Colour from Mexican Calendar Chromo: Full polychrome
Gradients
Form from Mexican Calendar Chromo: Naturalistic depiction
Restrained accents
Composition from Egyptian Painted Film Poster: Collage & layering
Extreme scale contrast

Mexican Calendar Chromo avoids collage & layering: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
Surface from Egyptian Painted Film Poster: Hard offset shadow
Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · Egyptian Painted Film Poster

Rose

Rakkas, standing in for Hand-painted Arabic calligraphic title logotypes

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 Egyptian Painted Film Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Egyptian Painted Film Poster Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

#f0c4a8 ground · 39%
#1f4e8c ink · 15%
#c8372d accent · 20%
#a8693f accent · 15%
#2f8f4e accent · 11%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f0c4a8;
  --ink: #1f4e8c;
  --accent-1: #c8372d;
  --accent-2: #a8693f;
  --accent-3: #2f8f4e;
  --font-display: "Rakkas", cursive;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

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.

The two styles

A vintage-style painted poster combines large portraits of a dark-haired woman and a mustached man in a white turban with Egyptian ruins, torch-bearing men, and sailboats on a river at sunset. Red Arabic lettering spans the top, while a woman in a flowing red dress crouches beside a carved stone wall below.

1932–1996 · Middle East & North Africa Egyptian Painted Film Poster The painted publicity of Egyptian cinema from the early talkies to the 1990s, designed outside the studios by artist-printers such as Hassan Mazhar Gassour and printed as colour lithographs in Cairo. Star portraits copied from stills float as cut-out heads above a melodramatic scene. The Arabic title is painted as a one-off calligraphic logotype whose swelling, interlocked strokes can act out the film's theme.

A painted-style poster shows a smiling woman in a floral embroidered blouse and blue skirt seated beside wicker baskets of harvested agave hearts. Agave plants, a town with a domed church, and distant mountains fill the background beneath the red and gold word “Agave.”

1930–1970 · Latin America & Caribbean Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos) 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.

More combinations

With Egyptian Painted Film Poster

All 18 combinations with Egyptian Painted Film Poster

With Mexican Calendar Chromo

All 13 combinations with Mexican Calendar Chromo

Every style combination