Style combination · Contrasts

Rorke's Drift Linocut × Tingatinga Painting

Rorke's Drift cuts dense black-and-white narrative bands; Tingatinga floats a few glossy, many-coloured animals on one ground. Use the contrast between carved monochrome story and painted colour field.

From the research on Tingatinga Painting

Mix them and make something Rorke's Drift Linocut Tingatinga Painting

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Tingatinga Painting, their arrangement from Rorke's Drift Linocut, the finish from Rorke's Drift Linocut. 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.

Rorke's Drift Linocut Tingatinga Painting

Type from Rorke's Drift Linocut: Hand-lettering
Colour from Tingatinga Painting: Full polychrome
Flat fields

Rorke's Drift Linocut avoids full polychrome: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
Form from Tingatinga Painting: Stylised figuration
Distortion & exaggeration
Composition from Rorke's Drift Linocut: Horror vacui
Sequential narrative
Surface from Rorke's Drift Linocut: Carved line

The type

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

Display · Rorke's Drift Linocut

Light

Agbalumo; Rorke's Drift Linocut used Hand-cut title in the block and Hand-cut captions and slogans

Text · Tingatinga Painting

A Tanzanian popular painting school begun in Dar es Salaam by Edward Tingatinga (1932–1972), who from 1968 painted animals, birds and village scenes in glossy bicycle enamel on square hardboard ceiling boards for residents and tourists. One flat ground colour carries black-outlined, caricatural animals with patterned bodies. Its roots are debated: Makua and Makonde hut-wall painting, Congolese pictures sold in the city. Relatives and pupils carried it on, moving to canvas from 1989, organising as the Tingatinga Arts Cooperative Society in 1990 and adding crowded city scenes and spirit themes.

Space Grotesk; Tingatinga Painting used Enamel-painted block-capital artist's signatures along the lower edge of the panel and Irregular hand-painted capitals for any Swahili or English title or caption that must accompany Tingatinga-derived graphics

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Tingatinga Painting, with a counter-accent from Rorke's Drift Linocut. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Rorke's Drift Linocut Tingatinga Painting

#f5f1e6 ground · 36%
#111111 ink · 14%
#f2b705 accent · 18%
#d9cfb8 accent · 14%
#d7261e accent · 10%
#1c75bc accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f5f1e6;
  --ink: #111111;
  --accent-1: #f2b705;
  --accent-2: #d9cfb8;
  --accent-3: #d7261e;
  --accent-4: #1c75bc;
  --font-display: "Agbalumo", cursive;
  --font-text: "Space Grotesk", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Rorke's Drift Linocut: These prints are the work of named Black South African and Namibian artists, many still in copyright with the artists or their estates, made under apartheid at a Lutheran mission centre. Rankin and Hobbs call the 'typical' Rorke's Drift print a construct that the market pushed artists to comply with; the centre also made etchings, aquatints, colour relief prints and screenprints, so treat this banded black-and-white linocut as one face of a diverse school, not the whole of it. Borrow the system (hand-cut black-and-white relief, banded narrative, words in the block), not a particular print, a named artist's figures or Muafangejo's lettering hand. Do not label generated work 'naive' or 'tribal' African art: when Clement Greenberg judged Art South Africa Today in 1975, Rorke's Drift artists were displayed in a 'catch all' section for representational and 'naive' works. Do not invent Zulu or Kwanyama ritual, Christian scenes or struggle martyrs as decoration: picture the subject the brief supplies in its own community's terms. Never add an artist's signature, edition number or a Rorke's Drift or ELC inscription to generated work, and never present a generated image as a Rorke's Drift print.

Tingatinga Painting: Tingatinga is the living livelihood of named Tanzanian painters, many in the Tingatinga Arts Cooperative Society in Dar es Salaam, and its market has long been undercut by fakes: copies of the founder's lion, peacock, leopard and buffalo were sold signed 'E. S. Tingatinga'. Never add Tingatinga's or any painter's signature, or a cooperative name, to generated work, and never present it as an original painting; commission, buy from or credit the painters by name instead. Do not call it generic 'African' or 'tribal' art, or dismiss it as 'airport art'. Its roots are debated, so do not present it as rootless or as a mere copy of Makua and Makonde hut-wall painting, and do not repeat the disputed claim that Tingatinga was Mozambican, which his family and the cooperative reject. Shetani and witchcraft scenes draw on Makua and Makonde belief; picture them as the brief's community understands them, not as spooky decoration.

The two styles

A black-and-cream, woodcut-style poster headed “GOOD WATER” shows four stacked scenes of villagers carrying water, working around wells, drinking, and tending crops beside round thatched houses. Decorative borders contain leaves, flowers, birds, fish, and wave patterns.

1962–1982 · Sub-Saharan Africa Rorke's Drift Linocut The prints of the Lutheran art centre that Swedish teachers Peder and Ulla Gowenius started at Ceza Hospital in 1962 and moved to Rorke's Drift in 1963: under apartheid, which denied Black South Africans formal fine-art education, the chief training ground for many Black artists. Azaria Mbatha, John Muafangejo, Charles Nkosi and others cut black-and-white linocuts of Bible stories, Zulu and Kwanyama history and daily life, often crowded into horizontal bands with every gap filled by figures, foliage and pattern. Muafangejo added titles, dedications and commentary in the print itself.

A large black elephant with an upraised trunk and long ivory-coloured tusks stands against a bright yellow background. Its body is filled with red, blue, green and cream flowers, leaves and dots, beneath the words “JAMBO PANYA.”

1968–present · Sub-Saharan Africa Tingatinga Painting A Tanzanian popular painting school begun in Dar es Salaam by Edward Tingatinga (1932–1972), who from 1968 painted animals, birds and village scenes in glossy bicycle enamel on square hardboard ceiling boards for residents and tourists. One flat ground colour carries black-outlined, caricatural animals with patterned bodies. Its roots are debated: Makua and Makonde hut-wall painting, Congolese pictures sold in the city. Relatives and pupils carried it on, moving to canvas from 1989, organising as the Tingatinga Arts Cooperative Society in 1990 and adding crowded city scenes and spirit themes.

More combinations

With Rorke's Drift Linocut

With Tingatinga Painting

Every style combination