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

bad drawings, good prints [and vice versa]...

Sometimes the format of this project hasn’t helped me create really good work.

Not every journey has yielded great ideas and drawings and in an ideal world I’d probably not have made prints of many [most?] of the images that I have over the past 13 or 14 months… the flip side of this is of course that the requirement to make silk purses out of the sow’s ears of my sketchbook work has resulted in some really pleasing prints [and bits of prints]...
And I’ve learnt a lot from that I think (just don’t ask me to explain exactly what it is that I’ve learnt there - it’s about refining your instincts I think, or something nebulous like that…)

Also, I’ve a load of drawings which, for varying reasons didn’t yet make it into print form, but which I hope to be able to cut in lino sometime soon…
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