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 9



so i've broken a rule with the next two prints - because they were really pretty quick and short journeys, these are smaller than the regulation A5 size. hope that's ok with you :-)

i'm using some different, old lino here. it's harder than the other stuff i've been using, and when you heat it up to cut it smells evocatively of school cloakrooms, somehow...

i'm trying to be a bit less deliberate with the drawing and cutting here, and i kind of like it. i'm using some of the larger blades in the cutting tool to see how that affects things...

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