Style combination · Contrasts

Lotería Card Imagery × Mexican Calendar Chromo

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.

From the research on Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

Mix them and make something Lotería Card Imagery Mexican Calendar Chromo

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Lotería Card Imagery, their arrangement from Lotería Card Imagery, the finish from Mexican Calendar Chromo. 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.

Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería) Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

Type from Lotería Card Imagery: All caps
Grotesque & neo-grotesque
Colour from Mexican Calendar Chromo: Full polychrome
Gradients
Form from Lotería Card Imagery: Stylised figuration
Naturalistic depiction
Composition from Lotería Card Imagery: Modular grid
Framed panels

Mexican Calendar Chromo avoids modular grid: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
Surface from Mexican Calendar Chromo: Painterly brushwork

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 · 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 Lotería Card Imagery. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería) Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

#f0c4a8 ground · 39%
#1f4e8c ink · 15%
#c8372d accent · 20%
#a8693f accent · 15%
#3d8b4f accent · 11%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f0c4a8;
  --ink: #1f4e8c;
  --accent-1: #c8372d;
  --accent-2: #a8693f;
  --accent-3: #3d8b4f;
  --font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

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.

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.