Style combination · Pairs well

Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art × Stencil Street Art

Cairo's stencillers worked in the same cut-and-spray idiom; set one stencilled face and a short slogan beside a brushed mural when a memorial has to be repeated across a city overnight.

From the research on Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals)

Mix them and make something Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art Stencil Street Art

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art, their arrangement from Stencil Street Art, the finish from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art. 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 Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals) Stencil Street Art

Type from Stencil Street Art: Stencil
All caps
Colour from Stencil Street Art: Monochrome
Flat fields
Form from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art: Folk & sacred symbols
Stylised figuration
Composition from Stencil Street Art: Isolated object
Single focal point
Surface from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art: Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · Stencil Street Art

No!

Black Ops One, standing in for Industrial and military marking stencils (crate and serial-number lettering; Banksy has said a stencilled serial number prompted his switch to stencils)

Text · Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art

The street art of Egypt's 2011 revolution and the years after it, when Cairo's walls, above all around Tahrir and Mohamed Mahmoud Street, became what Ammar Abo Bakr called a newspaper. Three idioms share them: portraits of martyrs with wings and eye patches; neo-Pharaonic friezes of mourning and marching women by Luxor-trained muralists; and sardonic caricatures, stencils and Arabic slogans against the army, Mubarak and later Morsi. Whitewashed again and again, the walls were repainted in reply.

Newsreader; Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art used Freehand Arabic slogans in spray paint and marker, sometimes with English lines, scrawled beside and over the pictures and Historical lām-alif ('no') forms collected from buildings, mosques, ceramics, textiles and books across the Islamic world, sprayed by Bahia Shehab

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Stencil Street Art, with a counter-accent from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals) Stencil Street Art

#e6e2d8 ground · 36%
#111111 ink · 14%
#d3212d accent · 18%
#1f3a4d accent · 14%
#c8963e accent · 10%
#8f8a82 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #e6e2d8;
  --ink: #111111;
  --accent-1: #d3212d;
  --accent-2: #1f3a4d;
  --accent-3: #c8963e;
  --accent-4: #8f8a82;
  --font-display: "Black Ops One", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}

Use it with care

Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals): These walls commemorate real people killed or maimed in 2011–13, whose families are alive, alongside images of women assaulted by security forces, Qur'anic verses and Coptic and Islamic sacred imagery; do not reuse martyr portraits, eye patches or the 'blue bra' as edgy protest styling for a brand, have every Arabic line read by a fluent reader, and credit the artists and photographers by name. The walls were also religiously contested: Awad painted some of his Pharaonic women nude as a stand against the Wahhabi style of Islam, and Salafists erased some martyr portraits and put Qur'anic verses in their place, so do not pair those figures with Qur'anic verses for effect. After July 2013 the interim government built its own martyrs' memorial in Tahrir, which protesters wrecked, and the Muslim Brotherhood staked its own claim to the revolution's dead, so check whose dead a reused martyr motif would seem to mourn. Political street art remains dangerous in Egypt: Ganzeer was detained in 2011, four graffiti artists were detained for 12 hours in May 2015 after painting a mural, and 400 copies of Walls of Freedom were confiscated in Alexandria for allegedly 'inciting violence', so never put Egyptian artists or collaborators at risk with work attributed to them.

Stencil Street Art: Spraying a wall without the owner's consent is vandalism or criminal damage in most jurisdictions, so get permission or a legal wall; a brand faking street stencils is no exception (IBM's 2001 'Peace, Love, and Linux' sidewalk stencils led to arrests and more than US$120,000 in fines). Most stencils start from someone else's photograph, as the AP's dispute over Fairey's Hope poster showed (settled 2011): shoot or license the source image, and do not pass off a pastiche as a Banksy, whose work is authenticated only by Pest Control. Do not use photographs of real victims, or places of real suffering such as separation walls and war ruins, as props for a brand or a joke; by Banksy's own account, a Palestinian man at the West Bank barrier told him they did not want the wall made beautiful.