enormously pleasing

call me a saddo, but this makes me very happy.
not all of these prints work so well - steep learning curve and all that - but occasionally one turns out really nicely.

colours, lines, lettering - they all work on this one. it's not perfect, but i'm very, very pleased with it.

[i spent a lot of time early on trying to get clean, flat, solid areas of ink. now i'm getting more interested in the textures you can get and working out how to achieve that...]

five women...

still a bit out of sequence, sorry :-)

following on from those five blokes, five leeds lasses.
i'm really pleased with her with the hair on the left there - it's a good likeness.
and there's a nice line running diagonally up the line of the back of the head of the woman furthest right, along descender on the letter 'y' and through the angle of the number 7 there. that's quite pleasing too, and totally accidental...;-)

forty...

slightly out of sync again, but here's number 40.

feels like a bit of a milestone :-)

these were all blokes that i drew whilst waiting at the bus stop...
i deliberately cut this block quickly and without much drafting or designing, and i quite like the way it's turned out.
it feels kind of spontaneous, i think...

salts mill, david hockney, photoshop...

just been for a birthday snack with sue to salts mill - we love it there.
absolutely loved these new hockney prints, all drawn in photoshop with a wacom tablet... very, very beautifully done...

if you haven't already...

...please think about signing the petition here against the bbc's plans to cut not only 6music, but also the asian network and great swathes of it's web output.

the trust announces it's decision next tuesday.
fingers crossed!

very much looking forward to...

...receiving my copy of this...

UPDATE...
it's here, and it's as brilliant as expected...
you can view it in it's full glory here...

no.38

printing white onto black paper, and with oil-based ink for the first time...

as usual, i'm quite happy with bits of it, less so with others.
and faffing about with turps and the general hassle of cleaning up afterwards was a bit awkward and stinking up the kitchen with the smell of white spirits made me a bit unpopular with sue and the kids...:-(

37th bus trip...

a print of a trip into leeds for a drink and a chat with jay.

it's three different blocks, overprinted, and it's the first time i've tried doing that.
it's by no means perfect,but i quite like the irregular shape of the outline and the way it breaks out of the rectangle. and the colours.
i tried to keep it fairly random [some of the other prints have been a bit 'designed' of late] so until i started printing i had no idea how the various bits would fit together - i cut three different heads to try out, and this was the best of them.

and it was really quite cold, for may...

meet the artist

ascension day

[image taken from my stations of the resurrection thing for cpas]

no.35

33 and 34

bus trips 33 and 34 - into town to meet with matt ward and then lunch at roots and fruits with james c.

all very enjoyable.

i'd gone with a plan for these trips and prints - to draw my reflection in the stairwell screen on both journeys, as i was planning a haircut whilst i was out as well, so it'd give a nice 'before and after' thing. sadly, i was in a bit of a rush, hopped onto the 35 from moortown corner and then realised that has no stairwell.
another lesson learned - don't try to pre-plan these things. or at least don't rely on those plans...
that trip on the 35 was notable for the sub Daily Mail conversation and general Meldrewisms of the old folks sat behind me.

i quite like these. they're not much of a development from no.27, but i think that they sit nicely together, and the text at the bottom is good. no great registration problems this time either, so i'm getting the hang of the press.
i like the slightly jungle-y feel of the upright poles, they're like hanging vines.
the furniture of buses is actually quite weird when you start to look closely at it...

if the journeys were longer or i could draw quicker or felt confident to take photos on the bus then maybe i could add in the passengers... :-)

noble failure

i'm out of sync again - this is bus trip no.36.

it's a frustrating one.
i had really high hopes for it too.
there are four colours - beige*, light blue, indigo and black.
but the indigo's dried very dark, darker than i'd envisaged.
so you can't really see sue's reflection over the bloke's right shoulder there.
which leaves the composition a bit unbalanced.

also i used my new press for the first time to make this print, and somehow the registration's gone a bit awry.
that wouldn't necessarily be such a huge problem [and now that i'm getting used to using the press i think i've cracked it] but when the two colours are so close in tone it can make the text illegible on some of them... :-(

and then i got impatient and the indigo ink [the penultimate layer] wasn't entirely dry when i did the black lines...

so very few of these prints have actually come out ok. only nine of the 13 are even remotely acceptable.
lots of lessons learned though...
and the highlight on the side of the bloke's head is very, very pleasing :-)





*hi, jim.

prints for sale...

so i've now been documenting my bus trips in lino for four months - i'm a third of the way through the project, and, for the most part, am enjoying it.

if you've not already received it via email, there's a pdf available here which has all of the prints through to mid-april on it.
i could do with selling a few at the mo, so please feel free to download it, have a look at what's available, forward it to anyone who you think might be interested etc.

pretty much all of the prints are for sale at £15 each - except for some small individual characters that are only a fiver a pop. prices include p&p, and i'll happily discuss discounts for bulk purchases :-)