Bus Trip 51

bus trip 51 - a little eight-page fold-up comic with an image on each page.
it was a pain to print, as i pre-cut and folded the paper and had to ink and layout eight separate blocks for each comic.
the colours and layouts may differ to the one in these snaps...

pencils vs. pens

It took me a long time to get my head around the relative and differing qualities of pencil drawings and block prints. A stupidly long time, if I’m honest.

My sketchbooks filled up with scribbly pencil drawings, which I was then trying to convert into lino. But the lines and the [relatively] subtly grey-shaded spaces translated pretty clumsily at times – I was a long way through the project before I started trying to think about the drawing process in terms of shapes, and positive/negative spaces.
Some of the less well-made prints I think suffer because of this.
Using a pen as opposed to a pencil for the sketchbook drawings helped a lot, as it got me away from describing things with lines of graduated grey graphite and into looking at solid black areas a bit more…

Bus Trip 52

this print documents people that i sketched on a trip into town to meet with ric stott, cheryl lawrie and her aussie team just after the greenbelt festival.

the composition is maybe not the best here - i was trying not to get too precise and controlled and just let the thing come together and that didn't work so well.
but the colour is ok, and it's getting back to the sort of composite images of people sketched that i was doing earlier in the project...

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...

Bus Trip 54

from a trip into town with jonah to get a train to barnsley. i was a bit migraine-addled, which was why i wasn't driving. joe drew the pics for me as i couldn't focus on the page too well, and this is basically an enlarged version of the sketch he made of a kid on a bike outside the shops opposite eddie's school.

he can really draw, can joe :-)

Bus Trip 55

so this is a bit of a weird one, and probably needs some explanation...

firstly, i lost the details in a sketchbook somewhere, so i couldn't find the timings to include on the print :-(

but it was a trip into town with jonah to buy boots, and i was pretty uninspired with the whole project at the time - the journey and the route and the bus itself all seemed a bit dull and over-familiar. and i was having this conversation with joe about what the worst disaster might befall us on that trip - i was thinking crazy-amazing disaster movies, hence this image.
and jonah's [very much] worst-case-scenario for the trip was that dennis wise might get on and come sit next to us...

thankfully, the journey was very uneventful.
[it didn't actually happen. honest. there were no actual alien squid. or meetings with short, unpleasant ex-footballers]

so this print is made up of two separate blocks - one in two colours to create the green layer and then a block for the black over the top...
i cocked up with the lettering a bit, so that's not come out quite how i'd have liked it.
and there are some lessons to be learnt about positioning the black layer if/when i try this again...

so i'm not overly chuffed with how it's turned out, in all honesty. but then part of the project is to show everything, the good and the bad, and to learn from both...

Bus Trip 56

a print that documents a trip home from town with our jonah - we been out buying football boots for his academy trial at barnsley fc* and this is from the journey back home.

i was very pleased with the print until i took one down from the drying line to pencil in the details under the image - that's when i spotted a black line that i'd erroneously left in.
[even though nobody else seems to notice it, i do, and it really bugs me]

i should have spotted it, it's a very frustrating mistake to have made, but the lesson to be learned is to spend a little more time and care examining the image each time i print a new layer... :-(





*it went very well, and he got in.