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 28



i was on the no4 purple bendy bus for the first time [unless you count a two-min hop-on-hop-off a stop later journey a year or two back]

clearly, the bendy buses were designed by sci-fi fans. right down to the futuristic fonts they've chosen for the signage. the whole furniture of the things scream 'Battlestar Galactica!'.
i kind of like it.

no offence to armley, but it does seem slightly incongruous to be travelling there on a vehicle quite that swish and self-consciously cool...

anyway - i ended up sat facing the exit door which seemed like a bad move for a minute or two, but then this guy came and stood across the doorway right in front of me, and that gave me something to draw....


i tried to get the architecture of the bus in a bit, and that makes for some nice abstract-y shapes.


there's a religious analogy going on in here as well, maybe.

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