Calavera
- Posada style
- Day of the Dead print
- Mexican skeleton print
Skeletons doing ordinary things, cut as a relief print in black with hot flat colour.
Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.
What it is for
The calavera tradition treats death as funny and sociable, which is the opposite of what a Western audience expects from a skeleton, and the surprise is the appeal.
It is also extremely readable. Bold relief-cut line and hot flat colour hold up at any size and on any paper.
How it works
Draw skeletons doing human things with energy: dancing, riding, drinking, arguing, wearing enormous hats. Never still and never menacing.
Cut the line boldly as a relief print, with heavy cross-hatching for tone and no fine shading.
Print hot flat colour slightly off register behind the black: marigold orange, magenta, turquoise. Add papel picado banners, marigolds and decorated skulls, and hand letter the display capitals.
When to use it
Use it for a Day of the Dead event, a Mexican food night, a street festival, a music night, a memorial celebration, a carnival.
Leave it alone for Halloween horror. The tradition is about remembering people fondly, and treating it as spooky misses it entirely.
Told apart from its neighbours
Expressionist woodcut uses the same relief cutting for grief and anger. Calavera uses it for a party.
Heavy metal and horror posters use skulls to threaten. Here the skeleton is the audience, not the monster.
Penny dreadful engraving is fine-lined and printed badly on purpose.
Where it was used
Jose Guadalupe Posada made thousands of these for Mexican broadsheets around 1900, and La Catrina, his skeleton in a fine hat, became the image of the Day of the Dead. Diego Rivera put her at the centre of a mural in 1947 and fixed her in the national imagination.
- Jose Guadalupe Posada
- La Catrina
- Day of the Dead
The prompt
Replace the blanks with your own event, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.
poster for <event>, Jose Guadalupe Posada calavera relief print, elegantly dressed skeletons doing ordinary human things with great energy, bold black relief-cut line with heavy cross-hatching, hot flat colour of marigold orange magenta and turquoise printed slightly off register behind the black, papel picado cut-paper banner across the top, marigold flowers and a decorated skull, hand-lettered Spanish-style display capitals, <date, time and place> in a banner ribbon
What goes wrong
The model returns a gothic horror skull. Ask for cheerful elegantly dressed skeletons doing ordinary things with energy, in a bright hot palette.
The second failure is fine shading. Say bold relief-cut black line with heavy cross-hatching and no soft tone.
Leave out
horror, gore, realistic skulls, dark gloomy palette, fine shading
Watch for
The skeletons are cheerful and busy. A grim skull turns it into Halloween, which is a different holiday.
Questions
Print it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
Next to it in folk traditions
