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...]