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

crispness and imperfection...

Part way through the project I treated myself to a well-illustrated book about printmaking and in it there’s a picture of a lino-cut of the Tate Modern. It’s a beautifully-made print, with several well-chosen colours; very, very carefully cut and faultlessly printed. It’s as crisp and clean as a screenprint.

It’s impressive, and for a while I beat myself up a bit about how un-crisp and fault-filled my printing was. After a bit though, I learned to love the little quirks and idiosyncrasies that emerge as you make each print. I spent some time messing about with the textures, deliberately trying to see what would happen when you layer slightly imperfect areas of colour up in a print.

I can’t say that I’m always happy with the quality of my prints – the mixing-up of the coloured inks in particular seems to be a very imprecise science and can make it difficult to always get the result you want. But this project has provided me with a good place to play around and explore the possibilities…

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