Style combination · Contrasts

Nianhua × Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture

Both are popular devotional woodblock prints pasted or hung for good fortune. Nianhua floods the paper with saturated figure scenes, whereas the Tibetan print keeps to one ink and lets the dyed cloth or the lines of script carry the effect.

From the research on Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture (Pecha & Prayer Flags)

Mix them and make something Nianhua Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Nianhua, their arrangement from Nianhua, the finish from Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture. 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.

Nianhua & Chinese Folk Print Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture (Pecha & Prayer Flags)

Type from Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture: Brush & pen calligraphy
Hand-lettering
Colour from Nianhua: Full polychrome
Flat fields
Form from Nianhua: Stylised figuration
Folk & sacred symbols
Composition from Nianhua: Central symmetry
Horror vacui
Surface from Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture: 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 · Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture

Light

Yatra One; Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture used Uchen (dbu can, 'with a head'), the headed script of print, written out by monk calligraphers as master copies for the block cutters and Umê (dbu med), the headless cursive of everyday handwriting

Text · Nianhua

Woodblock pictures bought each New Year and pasted on doors, walls and kitchen shrines to invite luck and ward off harm: paired door gods, plump babies with carp, the Kitchen God, opera scenes and auspicious rebuses. A black keyline block is overprinted or hand-coloured in saturated red, green, yellow and pink, and compositions are dense, frontal and often mirrored in pairs.

Shippori Mincho; Nianhua used Kaishu and Lishu (clerical script) for auspicious couplets

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Nianhua, with a counter-accent from Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Nianhua & Chinese Folk Print Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture (Pecha & Prayer Flags)

#f1e6cf ground · 36%
#1a1a1a ink · 14%
#f2c230 accent · 18%
#c8252c accent · 14%
#e5739a accent · 10%
#2f8a4e accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f1e6cf;
  --ink: #1a1a1a;
  --accent-1: #f2c230;
  --accent-2: #c8252c;
  --accent-3: #e5739a;
  --accent-4: #2f8a4e;
  --font-display: "Yatra One", cursive;
  --font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}

Use it with care

Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture (Pecha & Prayer Flags): Pecha, icon prints and prayer flags are sacred objects in living Tibetan Buddhist and Bön practice. The Kangyur is the Buddha's word (hence its cinnabar ink), icon prints guide the painting of deities, and flags carry mantras, the four dignities and prayers for a named sponsor. By tradition flags are not put on the ground or worn as clothing, and old ones are burned rather than thrown away. Do not use real or imitation pages, mantras or flags as texture, party bunting, fashion prints or logos, do not crop or mirror them, and have any Tibetan written or checked by a fluent reader. Image models cannot write Uchen and invent letters, so leave text areas blank in generated images and never present one as a real text or flag. Derge still prints by hand from its historic blocks, while Narthang's main halls were razed in 1966: credit and commission Tibetan calligraphers, carvers and printers, in Tibet and in exile, rather than tracing their blocks.

The two styles

A densely decorated, symmetrical Chinese folk-style print shows two children holding coins above paired carp and guardian lions, surrounded by pink flowers, green foliage, red lanterns and long-necked birds. A yellow panel with black Chinese lettering sits beneath a rising sun at the top.

c. 1100–present · East Asia Nianhua & Chinese Folk Print Woodblock pictures bought each New Year and pasted on doors, walls and kitchen shrines to invite luck and ward off harm: paired door gods, plump babies with carp, the Kitchen God, opera scenes and auspicious rebuses. A black keyline block is overprinted or hand-coloured in saturated red, green, yellow and pink, and compositions are dense, frontal and often mirrored in pairs. c. 1410–present · East Asia, South Asia Tibetan Woodblock Print Culture (Pecha & Prayer Flags) Tibetan Buddhist and Bön woodblock printing, from the first printed Kangyur (1410, cut in China) and the 15th-century presses of Gungthang to the great printing houses of Narthang, Derge and Lhasa. Books take the pecha form of Indian palm-leaf pothis: long, unbound oblong leaves of headed Uchen script, justified with syllable dots, cut in reverse from a calligrapher's copy and printed in black, or in cinnabar red for the Buddha's word. The same workshops cut icons, mandalas and prayer flags: a wind horse ringed by mantras, printed on cloth in five element colours and left to fade in the wind.