Style combination · Contrasts

Lotería Card Imagery × Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards

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.

From the research on Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards

Mix them and make something Lotería Card Imagery Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Lotería Card Imagery, their arrangement from Lotería Card Imagery, the finish from Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards. 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) Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards

Type from Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards: All caps
Hand-lettering
Colour from Lotería Card Imagery: Full polychrome
Pastel
Form from Lotería Card Imagery: Stylised figuration
Naturalistic depiction

Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards avoids naturalistic depiction: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
Composition from Lotería Card Imagery: Modular grid
Framed panels
Surface from Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards: Carved line
Misregistration & overprint

The type

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

Display · Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards

Pop

Cinzel, standing in for Roman capitals cut into the woodblock with the picture, in a band at the foot of each trump and court card, often with interpuncts and the copyists' spellings ('LE CHARIOR' and 'LA PANCES' on Dodal's cards, 'LE BATELEVR' with V for U)

Text · Lotería Card Imagery

The picture deck of Mexico's lotería, a bingo-like game of chance. Clemente Jacques's 54-card deck, published from 1887 and known in today's version since the early 1920s, set the canon: one figure or object per card (El Gallo, La Sirena, La Muerte), usually on a pale tinted ground in a ruled frame, a small number at the top and its name in capitals at the foot. A standard tabla sets 16 of them in a 4 × 4 grid, marked with beans as the caller draws cards and sings verses. Chicano artists, designers and parody decks keep redrawing the set.

Newsreader; Lotería Card Imagery used Plain, letterspaced sans-serif capitals with the article for the card names at the foot of each Don Clemente card and Small numerals at the top left of each card

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Lotería Card Imagery, with a counter-accent from Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería) Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards

#f4efe2 ground · 36%
#1d1d1b ink · 14%
#c62f2a accent · 18%
#e6c13f accent · 14%
#86c8e6 accent · 10%
#f2bfd3 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f4efe2;
  --ink: #1d1d1b;
  --accent-1: #c62f2a;
  --accent-2: #e6c13f;
  --accent-3: #86c8e6;
  --accent-4: #f2bfd3;
  --font-display: "Cinzel", serif;
  --font-text: "Newsreader", 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.

Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards: Trace decks cut before 1800 (Noblet, Dodal and Conver in the BnF; Dodal cards and early 19th-century Conver printings at the Met) rather than recent redrawings such as Grimaud's 1930 'Ancien Tarot de Marseille' or the 1998 Camoin–Jodorowsky restoration, which are modern works; and do not present the occultists' story of an Egyptian origin, launched by Court de Gébelin in 1781, as history: the pattern descends from Milanese tarot and was made for the card game of tarot, which French and Swiss players used it for until the early 20th century.

The two styles

A four-column, three-row grid of twelve numbered, black-bordered illustrated cards has Spanish labels on blue, pink, yellow, and cream backgrounds. The cards show a sun with a face, a flaming heart, a cactus, a crescent moon with a face, a butterfly, a guitar, flowers, a hummingbird, a decorated pot, corn, a palm tree, and a bicycle.

1887–present · Latin America & Caribbean, North America Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería) The picture deck of Mexico's lotería, a bingo-like game of chance. Clemente Jacques's 54-card deck, published from 1887 and known in today's version since the early 1920s, set the canon: one figure or object per card (El Gallo, La Sirena, La Muerte), usually on a pale tinted ground in a ruled frame, a small number at the top and its name in capitals at the foot. A standard tabla sets 16 of them in a 4 × 4 grid, marked with beans as the caller draws cards and sings verses. Chicano artists, designers and parody decks keep redrawing the set.

A crowned, robed figure holds a star-topped staff and rests one hand on a blue orb bearing a yellow star. Flowers flank the figure within a distressed black border, with “GUIDANCE” printed below.

1639–present · Western Europe, Southern Europe, Central Europe Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards The standard pattern of French tarot cards, descended from Milanese tarot and recut by card-makers in Paris, Lyon, Avignon, Dijon and Marseille from the 17th century. Each of the 78 cards holds one emblematic subject, a stiff figure or small frozen group, or a set of suit signs, inside a ruled frame, cut in wood with thick contours and sparse hatching and stencil-coloured in a few flat colours, chiefly red, yellow, blue, green and flesh (with violet in the 17th century); trumps add a roman numeral above and a carved title below. Occultists read it as a book of symbols from 1781.

More combinations

With Lotería Card Imagery

With Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards

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