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

BusTrip 29




the third of four bus trips in one evening [into town, then out to armley, then back again]



on the bendy bus, the seats face in different directions, meaning that you can draw peoples faces and not just the backs of their heads. the downside of this is that they can see you drawing them. so you have to be either very brazen [which i'm no good at] or very surreptitious [which i'm also not very good at, but at least it's less potentially confrontational]
this girl on the bus clocked me straight away though, before i'd even decided to draw her.

i tried hard to be inconspicuous as i sketched, but she knew i was looking at her.
she didn't seem very happy anyway, but i think i made her even less so.
i tried hard not to feel bad about that... couldn't help imagining a back story for her, and wondering what had made her so glum [other than having me staring at her and trying not to make it so obvious]


i like the composition of this pic though. she really was half-glaring at me through the hand rail like that.

somehow the design of it remind me a bit of rennie mackintosh - the shapes and the parallel [ish] verticals on the right [the folds of the bendy joint bit in the middle of the bus]
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