At the start of 2010 i found myself in need of a challenge, and so i embarked on a project to document every bus trip that i took during the year in the form of a lino print.

I'm an illustrator by trade, but i was so busy illustrating that I wasn't really doing much observational drawing any more. Plus I really fancied getting to grips with a new [ish] skill. And lino printing is a fairly easy thing to set up, at least to begin with...

I decided that each print would be A5, in a limited edition of 13, to celebrate the fact that the route i travel most is the 13/13A. It's a good job I don't live in Headingley and travel on the number 97 all the time...

Now the year is up and all the prints from the project are posted here, in journey order.

Some of the prints are a bit all over the shop if I'm honest. Some aren't even that good. Some are pleasing in places, and one or two make me very, very happy. Several of them have left me feeling utterly exasperated and seriously thinking of jacking the whole thing in.

But I didn't, and here they are. Inspired by Billy Childish, I have resolved not to think of them in terms of success or failures - they just are what they are and I've been trying to learn to do them better and to make something worth looking at...

Friday, February 11, 2011

Bus Trip 36




a frustrating one.
i had really high hopes for it too.
there are four colours - sort-of-beige, light blue, indigo and black.
but the indigo's dried very dark - much darker than i'd envisaged.
so you can't really see sue's reflection over the bloke's right shoulder there, which leaves the composition a bit unbalanced.

also i used my new press for the first time* to make this print *, and somehow the registration's gone a bit awry.
that wouldn't necessarily be such a huge problem but when the two colours are so close in tone it can make the text illegible on some of the prints... :-(

plus i'd got impatient and the indigo ink [the penultimate layer] wasn't entirely dry when i did the black lines...

so very few of these prints have actually come out ok. only nine of the 13 are even remotely acceptable.
lots of lessons learned though...
and the highlight on the side of the bloke's head is very, very pleasing :-)



*out of synch again - working my way through a backlog of sketchbook drawings and recorded bus trips so the prints weren't done in the order that i'd made the journeys...
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