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 43


i had to go to barnsley and gave meself plenty of time to get into town to get the train.
but the scheduled bus just didn't show, so it all turned into a bit of a mad panic. to commemorate the bus' non-arrival i did this quick experiment in blind embossing [where you don't use ink, but dampen the paper so that the imprint of the block leaves raised areas - it's a nice, subtle 3D sort of effect which can look amazing if you do it well...] this is my first stab at it, and the photo's not great. i used some old lino that my dad gave me - it's really hard, so you get very sharp edges. but it's also quite thin, so there's not a lot of depth to the cut, and having done this one i think the lesson is that the cut needs to be deeper, and/or the recessed areas on the block need to be flat[ter]. maybe i'd have been better constructing the block from cut-out letters glued onto card. so while it's not a huge success, i'll definitely be having another go at some point... *disclaimer for any pedants reading this - it actually might be a "debossing" that i've done here... i'm not entirely sure of the difference, to be honest :-)

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