Bus Trip 1

here's the first one. there are obvious things wrong with it [i need to work on the lettering for starters, and the drawings i did on the bus weren't great to be honest, and the printing is a bit ropey, and the composition could have done with more thought and and and...]

but hopefully as i do them there'll be some progression in the drawings and the design, and in the execution of the lino cutting and printing... this was my trip back from the city centre after a weekend away attending greenbelt programming meetings down south...

the guy top left had a chat with some other bloke waiting at the bus stop - i was planning to leave some white space above him so that i could pencil some of that conversation in, but decided against it in the end. the thing bottom left is the sign on top of the bus stop. and in the middle at the bottom there, that's my reflection in the stairwell partition thing.

rules...

At art college [a long time ago now] someone had scrawled the motto 'THERE ARE NO RULES' across the wall in our studio space...

I started this project with a few rules to guide me - each print would be A5, and contain the date of the journey, the time i got on the bus and some indication of the length of the journey, images documenting the trip, and the number of the bus.

Pretty soon those rules got abandoned, as i forgot to look at my watch, or write things down, or wanted to do things a different size, or ran out of A5 lino.

i didn't mind though, those rules helped me to get started on the project and gave me some sort of framework for thinking about it, but it soon expanded beyond them.

in the end i sort of agree with the art school graffiti- writer. When it comes to art, any rules that do exist are only there for you to flex against, play with and wilfully disregard if you want to. that's part of the fun of it...

on this one, the text is better, and the layout too.
need to work on the printing - maybe getting a bigger roller would help...

definitely an improvement though :-)

this was a very quick journey - just back from chapel allerton. normally i'd have walked it, but the icy conditions were a bit too treacherous, so i took the easy option. the ipod woman was sat in the mother-and-child seats with her kid in a pushchair. the woman in the white hooded thing was someone i glimpsed from the window - the sketchbook drawing of her is quite pleasing with some nicely drawn lines, but it doesn't really translate well here into simple shapes.

and i fell over whilst trying to draw the bus stop.

Bus Trips 3&4

i probably should've thought of this earlier, but it struck me that one trip into the city centre equals two bus trips - out and back.
so this print is my solution - divided into the two journeys, bus trips 3 & 4.

i took eddie into town to see the wonderful paper cinema. that's eddie top right. to his left is the bus driver who struggled to add up the fare and fixed us with a rather fierce glare as we exited the bus.

the homeward journey was wet, and i drew another, friendlier bus driver [bottom right]
the guy in the middle was a bloke at the bus stop who very politely let us on ahead of him.

i obviously need to be a bit more thorough in my proof-reading before i start cutting the lettering...:-)

i'm also wrestling with the balance between being very precise and tight, and making the lines clean and very 'graphic', and letting the cutters dictate a bit more for a rougher sort of look...

i'm also struggling a bit with the ink and the printing - i'm using water-based stuff and don't have a press, so it's all done with hand-held rollers and the back of a spoon. where there are larger areas of black it's proving really hard to get them dense and solid without losing the definition of the finer lines...

sketchbook drawings and memories

I got this great book for Christmas (thanks Mum and Dad)

In it, a range of creative types discuss their relationship to their sketchbooks, and how and why they use them.
One of the most common things in the book is the idea that when you look back at a drawing in your sketchbook you get a very definite sense of connection back to the time and place where you made the image – the sights, smells and sounds come back as a very vivid memory.

I think that’s true, and I was thinking about that in relation to this project.

If I’m honest, some of the prints that work the best don’t really have much connection back to the journey they relate to. There’s too much gone on between the drawing and the design, too much of a process involved in the distilling down of the drawing into a printable image. Too much change and refining.

Some of the others do have that very tangible connection back for me, but they’re not always the ones that work best as prints…
And then of course there are a few that manage to be both pleasing as prints and also memorably linked to the journey that they were created out of.

Bus Trip 5

this one's got a lot less areas of black in it - partly because this was a daytime journey, and partly because i wanted to get away from some of the problems i was having with over-and-under-inking the lino [this one was much easier to ink and print]

it records a trip to the bowery in headingley to meet with some of the advent exhibition artists.
i'm very pleased with the lettering top and bottom and the bus.
the little images = a couple of blokes i saw in moortown, some workmen chopping trees on the stonegate road, the hand of a very camp bloke in dark denim and a white baseball cap, a woman in wellies and a parka running with a slightly reluctant dog, a tree with interesting bark, a jewish bloke in one of those very distinctive hats, a well-wrapped-up woman with her ticket in her mouth who took ages to sit down, and a guy who got on and proceeded to have a ticket-waving rant at the driver for no obvious reason.

Bus Trip 6

made from drawings done on a trip into town to see 'the lone and level sands', a community play in leeds parish church.

simon hall was there, and gave me a lift home [one less journey to document - ha!]

the text is getting better on these, and i'm not really using a scalpel or knife to cut the lines dead clean now, just the lino tools, which is good i think.

i drew a load of windows this time [i like the architecture in leeds - when you start to look up there are some amazing and very lovely details and designs going on, often in unusual places]

i wanted to sketch some shop fronts too, but the bus was moving to quick and whereas i used to be able to look at something and fix the details in my mind's eye very quickly [drawing them immediately afterwards] i'm out of practice these days and need more time to draw that sort of stuff...

the bus stop was interesting - illuminated inside, with a shadowy figure heralding the bus from the doorway. the guy in the hat was a well-wrapped-up workman in harehills. there's also an asian guy in a cap [again, well protected against the cold] and a youth who hung from the dangling hand-support things, both passengers on the bus.

the bus itself is ok, possibly not as well-executed as the headingley single-decker in no.5 though...

i'm a lot happier with the inking on this one. that's very definitely improving now...

and it was very, very cold.

Bus Trip 7

a trip into town to get the train to blackburn.

out in the morning, back in the afternoon/evening, hence the different backgrounds of white at the top and the black panel at the bottom...
i got a bit more adventurous with drawing the furniture of the bus this time.[i tried to draw some shop fronts too but failed miserably!] i quite like these.

the journey home was in the rush hour, so was slowed by traffic, blizzardy conditions and a trainee driver. but because the bus was rammed i ended up sat up top, with the windows steamed up and the only view was of the back of many heads for the most part...:-(
the hand belonged to a small girl drawing in the condensation on the window.

Bus Trip 8

i'm still having some inking and printing problems here.
though i think that i'm beginning to resolve these, it's still a bit hit and miss :-(

[and without a press, and doing it by hand, maybe that's unavoidable...]

this is the bus stop on vicar lane where i get off the bus. a bit of a cheat maybe, as i drew the initial sketch after i'd wandered around town for a while, but i wanted to try something a bit different.

there's a couple more prints to do from yesterday, as i made the return journey via two buses, but i've not had time to draw those up yet. i think they'll be similar though - ie no figures, just bus-stops...

spontaneity and design...

I’m constantly battling with - on the one hand - a love of spontaneity and - on the other - my slightly obsessive compulsion to over-design these prints.

One of the inspirations for the project was a talk by Billy Childish at the Greenbelt festival where he talked about abandoning notions of success and failure in his art and instead just treating it as play. Doing it for the process and not the product.
I love that idea, and I’ve struggled to keep it at the heart of this project… I guess I grew up valuing that punk rock ethic of content over style – it’s the spirit of the thing that’s important to me, not the competency of how it’s put together.

i'd take the expressionists over the impressionists every time...

:-)

Bus Trip 9

so i've broken a rule with the next two prints - because they were really pretty quick and short journeys, these are smaller than the regulation A5 size. hope that's ok with you :-)

i'm using some different, old lino here. it's harder than the other stuff i've been using, and when you heat it up to cut it smells evocatively of school cloakrooms, somehow...

i'm trying to be a bit less deliberate with the drawing and cutting here, and i kind of like it. i'm using some of the larger blades in the cutting tool to see how that affects things...

Bus Trip 10

number ten!
sort of - it's probably number eleven really, but i kind of got out of sync at number seven [which should have been trips 7 & 8 - out and back - are you keeping up?]

anyway, i like travelling n this bus and getting off here, as somewhere en route it changes and when you get off it's no longer a 13 but a number 3. [does admitting that i like that make me a bit of a saddo? probably...]

Bus trips 11 & 12...

it was half term, so just for something to do, i dragged the boys into town.
i was kind of encouraged that they brought their sketchbooks with them, and maybe a little less enthralled by the mutant zombies that they drew en route.

anyway.
this prints sees eddie's second appearance in the series, still wearing his peaked woolly hat and hoody combination. he does have other clothes, honest.

i'm trying to get more adventurous with the text in this one. with mixed results, maybe.
i'd quite like to do one sometime that's almost all text.

the printing is improving though - becoming more consistent across the set of 13 each time i'm doing them [some of the early ones look pretty dodgy now, alongside these more recent ones...]

the conversation bits are snippets from things we discussed on the way home, as joe read his bart simpson comic and eddie pondered his 'bounty' bar...

Bus Trips 13 & 14

on this journey the plan was to draw animals, but chimneys took over, somehow.
and on the way back i sat on a seat next to some disgusting and discarded 'chixy chicken' wrappers. i also sat on my phone and rang lloydy by mistake. so time for drawing was a bit limited.
on the bus if you sit towards the rear you get to see the back of a lot of folks' heads. hence the three lads at the bottom there.

i'd just watched a dvd called 'beautiful losers' which i'd recommend if you're into skateboarding or outsider art or engagingly eccentric americans or documentaries and stuff. there was some utterly lovely hand-painted typography on display [a lot of it by margaret kilgallen; her stuff was just brilliant] - very inspiring, and something that i'd like to filter into these prints i think... [this one above is maybe a starting point for that...]

Bus Trips 15-18

here's a print for 11th march, documenting a trip into town then out to see an exhibition at left bank, before dashing back via chapel allerton to be home in time for joe getting back from school.

i've never been on the 91A before, so that was good. apart from the suspension on the bus, which made for a bumpy ride [difficult for drawing...]
and i quite like the text up top - since watching 'beautiful losers' [twice] on dvd i've been wanting to do some better typography on these prints. i decided to try to keep it simple and chose just one character sketched during each journey to include.

Bus Trips 19-22

this one is made up from four trips into and out of town to meet with gav and do some shopping...

each trip on the print takes up an amount space equivalent in ratio to the time spent on each bus [if that makes sense?]

to be honest, i was a bit uninspired. and i finished a sketchbook and had to buy a crappy notebook in order to have something to draw the journey home on.

see if you can spot where i completely omitted a number.

i really like the roughness of the black letters on this. and the bloke with the glasses next to the pickard sign.
and the guy with the tartan hat too.

shame that the composition's a bit all over the shop :-(

floundering about is good...

As a rule, I’ve tended to find that the work that I’m happiest with (in an artistic sense) is the stuff that I’ve done when I’ve tried something unfamiliar, where the work emerges almost unnoticed as I flounder about trying to get the software, tools or materials to work for me. When I’ve gained some sort of mastery of the techniques, somehow the work doesn’t have the same freshness and vitality. It’s like I’ve controlled all the life out of it. I guess that once I’m in control of the process, I can turn my attention to the product, and the work becomes a bit tame as a result.

Some of these prints suffer from too much control, too much of me trying to achieve a particular effect or an end product. Sometimes I’ve drawn something on a bus already thinking that it’ll make a good print (usually it doesn’t) Some of them are so carefully drawn, planned and cut that they feel a bit dead to me, a bit too fixed and lifeless.
Then again, some of the ones where I just went for it and bashed them out with very little design or thought beforehand, well they can turn out a bit disappointingly too… :-)

In the end there’s little rhyme or reason behind which prints work well and which ones don’t, and that I guess has been one of the joys and the frustrations of the project. Maybe it’s a case of slowly edging towards a better understanding of how to do stuff well rather than making huge strides forwards.

And then I come back to the original intent to get beyond the idea of success and failure and just be comfortable with making stuff and learning… :-)

Bus Trip 23

this one's kind of self-explanatory.
it made sue laugh, which is good, as i like her laugh [imagine a sort of cross between a chuckle and a smirk. a chirk? a smuckle? anyway...]

it was cut without warming the lino [this was quite a pliable block] using just one tool, and not worrying about being too precise.
that said, the lettering was pretty tricky to do.

number 24 was going to have about twice as much lettering on it as this.
i'm having a rethink about that one now :-)

Bus Trip 24

so with this one and the previous print i'd got a bit frustrated with the need to draw every trip.
hence all the writing.

this one was a kind of 100+ word stream of consciousness prose poem thing, but i had to edit it right down to fit on the block.

i'm still learning how to best mix the acrylic/block print medium stuff, and how it works when you apply it [best i think if you can leave it to go a bit tacky before you apply it]
and bits of this don't work too well ["SNAKO" for example]
some of the lines are cut too thin [particularly with the home-mixed ink]
so it's not a particularly artistically appealing piece.

but the black lettering on the blue works a treat, and i also love the bits that don't quite register and you get an accidental drop shadow.

after you've printed the blue colour you re-cut the block for the black and there's a sort of glorious, destructive pleasure when you hack away the blue lettering [eg "Bag in a tree", "Past the fire station"] that you'd so painstakingly carved just a day before :-)

Bus Trip 25

a bloke i drew from the no 97, headingley to the city centre.

i'm getting the hang of this two colour printing now. or improving, at least
:-)

at this point i toyed with abandoning the requirement to put all the text on there - the journey times and stuff - thinking that i'd only stick all that stuff on there when it suited the design...