Style combination · Pairs well

Mir iskusstva Book Art × Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration

Bilibin's Russian fairy tales are its eastern neighbour; take Bilibin's framed page and lettering and fill it with a Bauer-like deep forest for a northern storybook, keeping Norse and Russian sources distinct.

From the research on Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration (Werenskiold, Kittelsen, Bauer)

Mix them and make something Mir iskusstva Book Art Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Mir iskusstva Book Art, their arrangement from Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration, the finish from Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration. 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.

Mir iskusstva Book Art Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration (Werenskiold, Kittelsen, Bauer)

Type from Mir iskusstva Book Art: Hand-lettering
Ornamented display
Colour from Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration: Earth & mineral
Analogous harmony
Form from Mir iskusstva Book Art: Stylised figuration
Borders & frames

Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration avoids stylised figuration: this is where the two pull against each other.
Composition from Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration: Illusion of depth
Extreme scale contrast
Surface from Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration: Painterly brushwork
Carved line

The type

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

Display · Mir iskusstva Book Art

Rose

Federant; Mir iskusstva Book Art used Ivan Bilibin's hand-drawn cover titles and illuminated initials in an Old Russian manner, drawn as part of the page and Typeset Cyrillic text in a single block inside an ornamental border, opened by an illuminated initial and closed by a tailpiece

Text · Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration

Norwegian and Swedish folk-tale illustration in which trolls, nøkken and huldra live in a real, observed northern landscape of forest, mountain, bog and farm. Werenskiold invented the forest troll type for Asbjørnsen and Moe in 1879, Kittelsen made it grow out of rock, root and water in hatched pen and wash, and Bauer, in muted watercolour plates for Bland tomtar och troll, set small, still princesses among towering firs and lumbering trolls.

EB Garamond; Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration used Fraktur text and caption type in the Copenhagen Eventyrbog for Børn (1883–87), e.g. the caption '„Hutetu!" sagde Troldet. Tegning af E. Werenskiold.' under a full-page drawing in vol. 2 (1884) and Ornamented fantasy display lettering in red on a gilt panel, with nisser (gnomes), a cat and a porridge pot above it, on the publisher's binding of Eventyrbog for Børn vol. 1 (1883), drawn by Gotfred Albert Hartvig and engraved by J. C. S. Danielsen

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration, with a counter-accent from Mir iskusstva Book Art. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Mir iskusstva Book Art Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration (Werenskiold, Kittelsen, Bauer)

#e9e0c9 ground · 36%
#1f1e1a ink · 14%
#c4a04e accent · 18%
#6b5238 accent · 14%
#b8342a accent · 10%
#50606e accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #e9e0c9;
  --ink: #1f1e1a;
  --accent-1: #c4a04e;
  --accent-2: #6b5238;
  --accent-3: #b8342a;
  --accent-4: #50606e;
  --font-display: "Federant", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "EB Garamond", serif;
}

Use it with care

Mir iskusstva Book Art: This 'Russian' folk look is a refined, partly state-commissioned idiom of the imperial capital, assembled by professional artists from northern peasant crafts, lubki and icons: do not present it as timeless ethnic Russian folk art or as a neutral emblem of the Russian state, and keep icon-derived holy figures out of trivial uses. Its makers were not all Russian: Heorhiy Narbut, for example, became rector of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and designed the Ukrainian People's Republic's banknotes and stamps, so credit artists by their own identities. Benois (d. 1960) and Dobuzhinsky (d. 1957) remain in copyright in the EU and Russia (life plus 70 years, so at least until 2031 and 2028), while Bilibin (d. 1942), Somov (d. 1939) and Narbut (d. 1920) are in the public domain there: draw new borders, figures and lettering rather than reproducing their pages. Somov's Le Livre de la Marquise is explicitly erotic, above all the 1918 edition, so keep its plates out of children's or general-audience pastiche.

Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration (Werenskiold, Kittelsen, Bauer): Bauer took bent knives, shoes, spears, pots and belts from his 1904 sketches of Sámi life and made them part of his trolls' clothes and ornament: do not dress trolls or other monsters in Sámi gáktis, duodji or tools, or cast the Sámi, a living Indigenous people, as fairy-tale creatures of the northern wilderness. Kittelsen's pictures have also been reused by Norwegian black metal, including on Filosofem by Varg Vikernes, a neo-Nazi, so keep this imagery away from ethnic-nationalist and 'pure North' framings.