Lubok vs ROSTA Windows
ルボーク / ロスタの窓
Lubok comes from Popular Prints and ROSTA Windows from Printmaking and Social Movements. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with different intent, which is the fastest way to tell them apart.
Lubok
Russia's popular print: thick outlines, flat hand-coloring, image and text sharing the sheet, circulating sacred stories and satire cheaply. The avant-garde rediscovered it in the 20th century as Russia's native form.
ROSTA Windows
During the civil war the ROSTA news agency pasted stencil-replicated poster serials in the windows of empty shops. Mayakovsky and others turned the news into comic-strip panels of simple shapes and rhymed verse, inventing the prototype of rapid-response graphics.
| Lubok | ROSTA Windows | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 17th–19th century | 1919–1921 |
| Family | Popular Prints | Printmaking and Social Movements |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Thick outlines / Flat hand-coloring / Image and text together / Satire and story | Simple stencil shapes / Storytelling in panels / Red and black as signal colors / Rhymed captions |
| Best used for | Picture books and packaging where a told story shares the sheet with words · Editorial illustration carrying satire in a deliberately plain voice | Serial street posters and wall bulletins that answer events as they happen · Public notices explaining a situation or a procedure in a few panels |
| Type | Hand-written text poured around the picture and framed as one unit | Short rhymed lines in large hand lettering, one line to a panel |
| Composition | Drop perspective, range the figures across, fill the rest with words | Four to six panels with an obvious reading path from the top left |
| Material | Thick woodcut outlines with red, yellow and green washed past the line | Cut card stencils printed fast in two colors, red and black |
| Caution | Tidying the outline and keeping the color inside it removes the misregistration and rough hand that carried the warmth of a popular print. | Refining the shapes into one finished picture loses the speed of printing and pasting the same day, leaving the look without its function. |