Traditions & vernacular · 1940–1999 · South Asia
Hand-Painted Bollywood Poster
Also known as Hindi film poster art, Bollywood hoarding painting
The painted publicity of Bombay's Hindi film industry, at its height from the 1940s to the 1980s. Studio artists painted portrait-led montages that were printed by lithography and offset as posters, booklets and press ads, while hoarding painters enlarged them by hand onto giant cinema billboards. Floating star heads, melodramatic colour and bold hand-drawn title logos were its signature until digital photo printing displaced it in the 1990s.
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01
How it works
- Build the composition around the stars' faces, stacking or fanning oversized, emotionally charged heads above smaller vignettes of action and romance.
- Push colour past naturalism (red-lit faces for rage, blue for night, saffron sunsets) and model skin with glossy highlights or palette-knife texture.
- Hand-draw the title as a logo in extruded, shaded or textured letters, often with Hindi, Urdu and English versions on the same sheet.
- Let scenes dissolve into one another without frames, merging lovers, villains, guns and explosions across a dark or fiery ground.
- Scale up by hand: square up or project the painting onto hoardings so the same image carries across a street.
Bombay (Mumbai) poster studios and cinema-hoarding painters, India
02
Its design choices
From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.
- Layout & composition
- Space & hierarchy
- Typography
- Colour
- Surface & texture
- Ornament
- Medium & production
- Tone & intent
- Avoids
- Generous white space, Modular grid, Typography only, Non-representational, Monochrome, Flat, Rational & objective
Palette
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Typefaces
Hand-drawn 3D title logos
Latin, Devanagari and Nastaʿlīq
Extruded and drop-shadowed display capitals
Devanagari display lettering
Known for
Baburao Painter
posters for his own films, e.g. Kalyan Khajina, 1920s
Diwakar Karkare and Studio Diwakar
Deewaar, 1975; Amar Akbar Anthony, 1977
C. Mohan
Sholay posters and title logo, 1975
M. F. Husain
cinema-hoarding painter in Bombay before his fine-art career
Rajesh Devraj & Edo Bouman, The Art of Bollywood
Taschen, 2010
03
Make something in this style
Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Hand-Painted Bollywood Poster’s design choices and checks it against them. It takes about a minute, and you get a link to share.
04
Where it comes from, and what it’s close to
Before it
The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.
After it
The styles that grew out of it.
No later style in the atlas grew out of it yet.
Alike in its design choices
Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.
05
Real works
Artefacts in museums, libraries and archives that show the style, linked at their source.
- Deewaar (1975)Diwakar Karkare · 1975 · Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IS.96-1988)
- Anokhi Ada (1948)Bide Viswanathan · 1948 · Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IS.24-2001)
- Anarkali (1953)Pamart · post 1952 (film released 1953) · Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IS.82-1986)
- Naseeb (1981)Diwakar Karkare · 1981 · Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IS.101-1986)
06
Sources
- Rajesh Devraj & Edo Bouman, The Art of Bollywood (Taschen, 2010)
- Google Arts & Culture, ‘The Art of Movie Posters’ (story on Indian film poster painting)
- Scroll.in, profile of poster artist C. Mohan and the Sholay posters
How Stylogeny researches and checks a style: where the facts come from.