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 26



this was my first stab at two-colour printing.
the guy pictured was stood outside the building college, bright red hair and a matching orange coat/jacket.
i'd been thinking for a while about trying to use an additional colour, so this was ideal.

using a medium to convert the acrylic colour for the orange layer into ink was not quite as straightforward as i'd hoped [i'm terrible at judging quantities and ratios...!] but i got it about right in the end...

the letters at the top work well, i think [the numbers, less so]
i like the way it doesn't quite register, so you get an orange echo of the black outline.

next time i do a two-colour print i'll try to use the second colour to create highlights and shadows - he's maybe a bit flat here.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)