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 53



though it's not the final journey that i made, this is the final print that i made in the project - 'proper' work got in the way and i ended up with a backlog of trips to document on a couple of occasions...

there's not a huge amount to say about it - it's just seven people observed out and about from a bus on a relatively balmy night...
like a lot of these prints, it's a bit of a curate's egg - good in parts.
the guy in the checked shirt lets it down i think... the pattern doesn't sit so well with the more solid areas of black in the rest of the print.
also, the line between the smoking girl and the texting bloke beneath isn't as clear as i'd have liked.

more lessons learned...
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