Style combination · Pairs well

Kinshasa Popular Painting × Mexican Popular Graphics

Posada's broadsheets and Kinshasa canvases are both topical, moralising pictures with long texts for ordinary readers; pair a Posada-style headline with a painted, captioned scene.

From the research on Kinshasa Popular Painting

Mix them and make something Kinshasa Popular Painting Mexican Popular Graphics

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Mexican Popular Graphics, their arrangement from Kinshasa Popular Painting, the finish from Mexican Popular Graphics. 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.

Kinshasa Popular Painting Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada)

Type from Kinshasa Popular Painting: Hand-lettering
All caps
Colour from Kinshasa Popular Painting: Full polychrome
Flat fields
Form from Mexican Popular Graphics: Stylised figuration
Distortion & exaggeration
Composition from Kinshasa Popular Painting: Layered information
Framed panels
Surface from Mexican Popular Graphics: 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 · Kinshasa Popular Painting

Ours

Londrina Solid, standing in for Sign painter's hand-lettered capitals for painted titles and banners

Text · Mexican Popular Graphics

Cheap broadsheets, chapbooks and gazettes sold on the streets of Porfirian Mexico City by the publisher Antonio Vanegas Arroyo and illustrated by Manuel Manilla and José Guadalupe Posada. A bold relief picture of crime, disaster, miracle or satire sits under shouting display type and columns of corridos, printed in black on brightly coloured cheap paper, while the calavera skeleton lampoons every class.

Bodoni Moda; Mexican Popular Graphics used Nineteenth-century display types and Modern (Didone) roman for corridos and verse

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Kinshasa Popular Painting, with a counter-accent from Mexican Popular Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Kinshasa Popular Painting Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada)

#121212 ground · 36%
#f6f1e3 ink · 14%
#f4c20d accent · 18%
#f0d14a accent · 14%
#d7262e accent · 10%
#d6337f accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #121212;
  --ink: #f6f1e3;
  --accent-1: #f4c20d;
  --accent-2: #f0d14a;
  --accent-3: #d7262e;
  --accent-4: #d6337f;
  --font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
  --font-text: "Bodoni Moda", serif;
}

Use it with care

Kinshasa Popular Painting: This is the signed work of named Congolese painters, not anonymous folk art: Chéri Samba and younger painters such as JP Mika are living, and the work of the late Moké, Bodo and Chéri Chérin is still exhibited and sold, as in Magnin-A's 2024 Moké show. Borrow the method of words inside a painted scene, but do not copy a particular painter's self-portrait, signature or 'artiste populaire' tag. The caricature is self-critique from inside Kinshasa, aimed at conduct, money and power: never exaggerate racial features or sexualise Black bodies for a laugh, the colonial cartoon language of Tintin au Congo, which Zairian newspapers reissued as a serial in the 1970s, just as this school began. Never fill balloons and captions with invented pseudo-Lingala; write real French or Lingala checked by a speaker, and commission Congolese artists where you can.

The two styles

A colourful French-language cleanliness poster shows a street sweeper addressing a young man holding a plastic bottle beside a green rubbish bin on a littered Kinshasa street. Smaller panels contrast blocked drains and flooding with a clean boulevard, while illustrated symbols along the bottom encourage proper disposal and recycling.

1970–present · Sub-Saharan Africa Kinshasa Popular Painting A school of easel painting founded in Kinshasa in the early 1970s by Chéri Samba, Moké, Chéri Chérin and Pierre Bodo, largely self-taught painters, several of them trained in Kinshasa's billboard and sign workshops. Bright, flatly outlined scenes of city life carry painted titles, speech balloons and long captions, mostly in French and Lingala, so that a canvas reads like a satirical editorial cartoon at painting scale on sex, AIDS, money, corruption and politics, often with the painter in the picture as narrator; Moké instead reported the city's streets, bars and ceremonies. 1880–1917 · Latin America & Caribbean Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Cheap broadsheets, chapbooks and gazettes sold on the streets of Porfirian Mexico City by the publisher Antonio Vanegas Arroyo and illustrated by Manuel Manilla and José Guadalupe Posada. A bold relief picture of crime, disaster, miracle or satire sits under shouting display type and columns of corridos, printed in black on brightly coloured cheap paper, while the calavera skeleton lampoons every class.