Style combination · Contrasts
Imagerie d'Épinal × Lotería Card Imagery
Both are cheap coloured popular prints of stock figures in ruled frames under capital captions, but an Épinal sheet tells a story or musters a row of soldiers across many cases, while a lotería card holds one emblem and the tabla's cells have no order: the caller draws them by chance.
Mix them and make something Imagerie d'Épinal Lotería Card Imagery
01
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.
Imagerie d'Épinal & European Bilderbogen Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería)
- Type from Lotería Card Imagery
- Colour from Imagerie d'Épinal
- Form from Imagerie d'Épinal
- Composition from Lotería Card Imagery
- Surface from Imagerie d'Épinal
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Lotería Card Imagery
Fiesta
Londrina Solid, standing in for Hand-drawn capitals on homemade tablas and artists' redrawn decks
Text · Imagerie d'Épinal
Cheap single-sheet popular prints sold by pedlars across 19th-century Europe, led by the Pellerin imagerie at Épinal and the Neuruppin Bilderbogen. A black woodcut, and later a lithograph, was coloured by hand through stencils in a few flat colours that drift past the outlines: Napoleonic battles, saints, rows of soldiers to cut out, and stories told in grids of equal captioned cases, under a title in roman capitals, or Fraktur in Germany.
Bodoni Moda; Imagerie d'Épinal used Bold modern-face (Didone) roman capitals for the centred title, sometimes shaded or outlined and Small roman text in a justified block beneath the picture, with the imprint ('De la fabrique de Pellerin, imprimeur-libraire, à Épinal') in capitals and 'Propriété de l'Éditeur. Déposé.' in italic
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Imagerie d'Épinal, with a counter-accent from Lotería Card Imagery. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Imagerie d'Épinal & European Bilderbogen Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería)
-
#efe6ccground · 36% -
#1c1a17ink · 14% -
#e4bb3aaccent · 18% -
#c62f2aaccent · 14% -
#86c8e6accent · 10% -
#2f56a0accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe6cc;
--ink: #1c1a17;
--accent-1: #e4bb3a;
--accent-2: #c62f2a;
--accent-3: #86c8e6;
--accent-4: #2f56a0;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Bodoni Moda", serif;
}Use it with care
Imagerie d'Épinal & European Bilderbogen: Many sheets carry nationalist, militarist and colonial messages, from the Napoleonic legend to colonial campaigns such as the Tonkin war, and some show colonised peoples as 'savages' (the Kühn Robinson sheet captions 'die Wilden' slaughtering captives at a feast), so do not reproduce these figures as period charm; the Imagerie d'Épinal still trades under its name, so draw new sheets rather than copying its marks.
Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería): Lotería is a living family game, played across Mexico and much of the United States and in parts of Central America, and a marker of Mexican and Mexican-American identity, so do not use it as generic 'Mexican' party decoration for products with no tie to those communities, and commission and credit Mexican, Central American and Chicanx artists when you redraw it. The standard deck's nine human figures are all stereotypes of Indigenous people, upper-class white people and Afro-Latinos (TIME, citing Gloria Arjona), most plainly El Negrito (No. 26) and El Apache (No. 38), stock figures of a Black man and a Native American, and other decks carry the same kind of figure (the feathered Indio with bow and arrow on Lomas Garza's 1972 tablas): do not reproduce them as period charm; replace them, as new decks freely do. The owners of Don Clemente Gallo (Pasatiempos Gallo) hold the registered trademark of the original images, so draw new emblems rather than tracing them, and write card names in correct Spanish instead of mock-Spanish.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Imagerie d'Épinal
- Lubok Popular Print Contrasts · Both are pedlars' broadsheets coloured by hand, but the lubok crams verse into the gaps around its figures and brushes washes on freely, while the Épinal sheet keeps its text beneath a ruled frame and stencils colour across rows of repeated figures; choose the lubok for jostling satire and Épinal for an orderly catalogue or story.
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Pairs well · Posada's hojas volantes are another pedlar broadsheet with a crude relief picture over a block of text; add Épinal's stencil colour to a black relief broadsheet for a hand-coloured street print.
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Pairs well · Both line up identical figures in rows, Épinal to be cut out as toy soldiers and Isotype to count; borrow Isotype's rule that one figure stands for a quantity to turn a sheet of soldiers into a readable chart.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Riso's few flat inks and drifting registration reproduce the stencil float of an Épinal sheet; print rows of repeated figures in red, blue and yellow over a black key for a contemporary imagerie.
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Pairs well · Both read as captioned grids of drawn cases with clear contour and flat colour; give a clear-line strip Épinal's stencil drift, roman-capital title and caption under every case for a 19th-century picture-story feel.
- Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type Contrasts · The same century's printers, but jobbing letterpress leads with mixed display type in one or two inks, while the Épinal sheet leads with a stencil-coloured picture and keeps type to a title and a caption block; set them side by side to choose between a notice and a picture.
- Emblem Book (Motto, Picture & Epigram) Contrasts · Both centre a framed picture over a block of text, but the Épinal sheet tells a popular story in stencil colour for a broad public, while the emblem is a learned monochrome riddle, one to a page, read slowly in sequence.
- Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards Contrasts · Both stencil-colour a black woodcut key in a few drifting colours, but the Épinal sheet tells a story in grids of captioned cases and marches rows of soldiers, while the tarot card isolates one emblematic subject under a numeral and a title; choose tarot for a single symbol, Épinal for a sequence.
With Lotería Card Imagery
- Kanga (Swahili Message Cloth) Contrasts · Both centre one motif in a frame above a line of capitals, but a kanga is a cloth whose printed Swahili saying is its message, while a lotería card prints only the emblem's name and leaves the verse to the caller's voice.
- West African Barbershop & Hair Salon Signs Contrasts · Both lay out named, numbered pictures in rows and columns, but a barbershop sign is one hand-painted menu of heads that differ only in their hairstyle, under the shop's boast, while a lotería tabla is a printed board of unrelated emblems, one of a set of boards that each hold a different selection from the same deck.
- Chicano Screenprint Poster Pairs well · Chicano artists from Carmen Lomas Garza's 1972 tablas onward redraw the lotería card as a sign of Mexican-American home life; frame a screenprinted slogan or portrait as a numbered, named card to borrow that recognition.
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Contrasts · Both set picture signs on a grid, but Isotype's pictograms are reduced, uniform and repeated to count quantities, while every lotería emblem is a different, fully drawn picture with its own name, matched by chance and read aloud.
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Pairs well · Posada himself printed a Juego de lotería; pair the lotería card's single framed emblem and name with his black relief calaveras and shouting broadside type for a Mexican popular-print voice that is both orderly and satirical.
- Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards Contrasts · Lotería also gives each card one figure with its name at the foot, but in letterspaced sans capitals and soft offset colour; borrow the tarot's carved roman title band, ruled frame and stencil drift to make a lotería-type card set look older and graver.
- Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos) Contrasts · Both are popular Mexican colour prints for everyday use, but the lotería sets one flat, outlined emblem figure per numbered card in a ruled frame, named in capitals at the foot, for a game, while the chromo paints one modelled scene in deep landscape to hang for a year.