Book Report: The Yellow Bus

14. Loren Long, The Yellow Bus (2024) 8/19/24

I am a quarter of the way through Lonesome Dove, 225 pages, 24 chapters, in: it is long! And so when a box of books arrived on my doorstep today, and one of them happened to be a children's picture book—I love me a beautiful picture book—I decided the Dove wouldn't mind if I forsook it for another book for, oh, fifteen minutes.

I first learned about The Yellow Bus in a New York Times article that describes the author, Loren Long's painstaking construction of a model town for the yellow bus, and the actual bus that served as his inspiration: abandoned in a farmer's field, with goats grazing nearby. The bus took over his imagination as he wondered about its life and all the people (and other creatures) who "filled it with joy." 

It's a lovely story of life and change, loss and renewal. In his notes at the end of the book, Loren writes: 

As I worked, I was struck by the fact that this story is about an object universally and instantly recognized as yellow. It was this yellow that I wanted to shine through the artwork, no matter where the bus was in her journey.

Perhaps for this reason, many of the images in the book are plain graphite, with the bus and its occupants providing the only burst of color. He continues:

Which brings me back to the yellow bus that I still run past every day. I'll probably never know how it got there and what its story actually is. But I'm thankful for that bus—for the life it had and for the one it has now. I'm thankful that it inspired me to think and reflect and imagine and create. And I'm thankful that when I look at my own life, I see many people who embody what the yellow bus is all about.

Here are some images from the book (they're in somewhat reverse order, but I'm including them for their graphic quality, not for a sense of story). The art, the copyright page says, "was crafted with graphite pencil, charcoal pencil, and charcoal dust on Epson Doubleweight Matte paper; it was scratched out with X-Acto blades and smudged with Q-tips. The colors were created with acrylic paint, and all of it was mixed with whatever dust and dog hair may have been floating in the artist's studio."

And finally, here are a couple of photos from the NYT article, of Long's working drawings on his drafting table and of the town he built. I love to see the creative process in action. And I love this book.