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 trips 11 & 12...



it was half term, so just for something to do, i dragged the boys into town.
i was kind of encouraged that they brought their sketchbooks with them, and maybe a little less enthralled by the mutant zombies that they drew en route.

anyway.
this prints sees eddie's second appearance in the series, still wearing his peaked woolly hat and hoody combination. he does have other clothes, honest.

i'm trying to get more adventurous with the text in this one. with mixed results, maybe.
i'd quite like to do one sometime that's almost all text.

the printing is improving though - becoming more consistent across the set of 13 each time i'm doing them [some of the early ones look pretty dodgy now, alongside these more recent ones...]

the conversation bits are snippets from things we discussed on the way home, as joe read his bart simpson comic and eddie pondered his 'bounty' bar...

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