Style combination · Pairs well
Lambe-Lambe Posters × Stencil Street Art
Both descend from or sit beside graffiti culture in the street; pair a pasted series with a painted element only where a project needs both.
Mix them and make something Lambe-Lambe Posters Stencil Street Art
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.
Lambe-Lambe Posters (Brazilian Paste-Up Street Posters) Stencil Street Art
- Colour from Stencil Street Art
- Form from Stencil Street Art
- Composition from Lambe-Lambe Posters
- Surface from Lambe-Lambe Posters
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Stencil Street Art
Noise
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 · Lambe-Lambe Posters
Paper posters and stickers in sheets of varying sizes, pasted with hand-made glue onto walls, poles and bins in densely urbanised Brazilian cities. Derived from the language of graffiti, lambes combine illustration, collage and photography, and repeat mass-reproduced images in series. Unlike a commercial cartaz they carry a critical, questioning message about social issues.
Oswald; Lambe-Lambe Posters used Hand-drawn lettering, where present and Whatever display lettering the artist supplies; no typeface is established for the form
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Stencil Street Art, with a counter-accent from Lambe-Lambe Posters. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Lambe-Lambe Posters (Brazilian Paste-Up Street Posters) Stencil Street Art
-
#e6e2d8ground · 39% -
#111111ink · 15% -
#d3212daccent · 20% -
#8c8a82accent · 15% -
#1f3a4daccent · 11%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #e6e2d8;
--ink: #111111;
--accent-1: #d3212d;
--accent-2: #8c8a82;
--accent-3: #1f3a4d;
--font-display: "Black Ops One", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Oswald", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Lambe-Lambe Posters (Brazilian Paste-Up Street Posters): Lambe-lambe here means the critical street-poster practice, not the commercial cartaz (advertising) or circus posters, which are a separate lineage. Wikipedia also links Latin American posters of the 1960s to late 1980s to protest against military regimes, including in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo; this entry covers the contemporary urban scene documented by 2015-2016 studies, and its start date of 2010 is an approximation, not a sourced origin. Lambes are political and critical speech, often about social inequality; do not borrow the look as a decorative or commercial 'edgy' skin. Visual traits beyond illustration, collage, photography, serial repetition and wall pasting (lettering, photocopy, stencil, ink count) are not established by the sources read, so they are held at low weight; the palette is a neutral paper-and-ink approximation, not sampled from posters. The Fortaleza 2016 and ANPAP 2017 papers could not be verified and are not relied on. Pixação is a separate Brazilian practice with its own entry. The Luis Alvaz sticker is the only named maker found; the exemplars are otherwise scholarship, not posters.
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.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Lambe-Lambe Posters
- Pixação (São Paulo Tag Reto) Contrasts · Both are Brazilian urban wall practices, but lambes are pasted paper with illustration, collage and photography in series, while pixação is painted lettering; compare the medium, not the politics.
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Order from a rigorous grid and neutral type set against order built by repeating pasted sheets by hand.
- Latin American Feminist Protest Graphics (Ni Una Menos and the Green Wave) Contrasts · A later Argentine protest-graphics movement; compare how a campaign gets a unified look by shared symbol versus by serial pasting of varied images.
With Stencil Street Art
- Graffiti & Hip-Hop Graphics Contrasts · Both use spray paint in the street, but graffiti makes the writer's name a freehand, many-coloured letter-sculpture with 3D blocks and fades; stencil art sprays a reproducible photographic picture in black. Decide which one the brief needs before mixing them.
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Stencil art borrows the repetition and reach of branding to mock it, as OBEY parodies advertising; a black figure sprayed beside a clean corporate mark makes the question of who owns public space visible.
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Stencilling grew out of punk (Kaagman's fanzine scene, Crass's Underground slogans); pair a sprayed figure with xerox collage and ransom-note lettering for a flyer or sleeve with the same anti-authority edge.
- Russian Constructivism Pairs well · Fairey's Obey posters borrow Soviet propaganda's red, black and cream and its heroic portrait; give a stencilled face a red bar and a one-word slogan for agitprop with a knowing twist.
- Pop Art Graphics Pairs well · Both repeat an appropriated photograph through a stencil; add Pop's serial grid or one off-register accent colour to turn a single street figure into a print edition.
- Chinese Paper-Cut (Jianzhi) Pairs well · Both depend on bridges that hold every island of the design to the sheet; give a spray stencil the paper-cut's folded symmetry and saw-tooth texture.
- BUGA UP Billboard Alteration Contrasts · Stencils bring their own imagery to the wall; BUGA UP takes the wall's existing imagery and turns it.
- Extinction Rebellion Graphics Pairs well · ESP spread the symbol as a street artist before XR adopted it, chalking it on Brick Lane and putting up posters and tiles around East London; pair XR's one-colour emblem and short slogans with stencil street art's hard-edged sprayed figures for walls and pavements.