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 55



so this is a bit of a weird one, and probably needs some explanation...

firstly, i lost the details in a sketchbook somewhere, so i couldn't find the timings to include on the print :-(

but it was a trip into town with jonah to buy boots, and i was pretty uninspired with the whole project at the time - the journey and the route and the bus itself all seemed a bit dull and over-familiar. and i was having this conversation with joe about what the worst disaster might befall us on that trip - i was thinking crazy-amazing disaster movies, hence this image.
and jonah's [very much] worst-case-scenario for the trip was that dennis wise might get on and come sit next to us...

thankfully, the journey was very uneventful.
[it didn't actually happen. honest. there were no actual alien squid. or meetings with short, unpleasant ex-footballers]

so this print is made up of two separate blocks - one in two colours to create the green layer and then a block for the black over the top...
i cocked up with the lettering a bit, so that's not come out quite how i'd have liked it.
and there are some lessons to be learnt about positioning the black layer if/when i try this again...

so i'm not overly chuffed with how it's turned out, in all honesty. but then part of the project is to show everything, the good and the bad, and to learn from both...
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