Style combination · Contrasts

Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration × Victorian Colour Toy Books

Both are children's picture books of the same era, but the toy book's bright flat key-block colour and nursery cheer stand against this dusky, modelled and uncanny northern mood.

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

Mix them and make something Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration Victorian Colour Toy Books

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration, their arrangement from Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration, the finish from Victorian Colour Toy Books. 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.

Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration (Werenskiold, Kittelsen, Bauer) Victorian Colour Toy Books (Evans, Crane, Caldecott and Greenaway)

Type from Victorian Colour Toy Books: Hand-lettering
Colour from Victorian Colour Toy Books: Full polychrome
Flat fields

Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration avoids full polychrome and flat fields: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
Form from Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration: Naturalistic depiction
Distortion & exaggeration
Composition from Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration: Illusion of depth
Extreme scale contrast
Surface from Victorian Colour Toy Books: Misregistration & overprint
Carved line

The type

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

Display · Victorian Colour Toy Books

Yay!

Londrina Solid, standing in for Hand-lettered titles and verses

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 Victorian Colour Toy Books, with a counter-accent from Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration (Werenskiold, Kittelsen, Bauer) Victorian Colour Toy Books (Evans, Crane, Caldecott and Greenaway)

#f1e6cc ground · 36%
#2b2622 ink · 14%
#e0a93b accent · 18%
#c4452f accent · 14%
#6b5238 accent · 10%
#4f7ea6 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f1e6cc;
  --ink: #2b2622;
  --accent-1: #e0a93b;
  --accent-2: #c4452f;
  --accent-3: #6b5238;
  --accent-4: #4f7ea6;
  --font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
  --font-text: "EB Garamond", serif;
}

Use it with care

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.

The two styles

An enormous, moss-covered troll merges with a rocky, forested mountainside and looks down toward a small girl standing on a ledge. A waterfall rushes through the gorge beside a distant wooden cabin beneath a full moon, with “Skogvokteren” lettered across the upper sky.

1879–1918 · Northern Europe Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration (Werenskiold, Kittelsen, Bauer) 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. 1865–1900 · Western Europe Victorian Colour Toy Books (Evans, Crane, Caldecott and Greenaway) Mass-printed children's picture books in which a black key block and flat colour blocks (generally up to a dozen, as few as four), printed by Edmund Evans from wood, carried pictures that dominated short texts. The illustrators Walter Crane (flat tints and sharp outlines, influenced by Japanese colour prints), Randolph Caldecott (loose, comic movement) and Kate Greenaway (dainty colours and invented late-18th-century and Regency costume) gave the format three distinct hands under one genome; image.comic belongs to Caldecott only.

More combinations

With Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration

With Victorian Colour Toy Books

Every style combination