Bluebird & MOTGM Excels
These are Optare Excel liveries done for calumrice, of Bluebird 'hi-tech low floor', the Museum of Transport Greater Manchester based off their LDV van, plus half & half variants. Presumably they relate to FD02 SFN in some way, although I just kind of winged it with the front panel and other finer details.
Looking up references for Bluebird, as well as rogue images of American school buses there seemed to be Bluebird, and Blue Bus, that appeared to operate up Manchester way, but I couldn't tell if they were connected or not. Bluebird had this two-tone wavy livery for low floor buses, that was actually quite fun to draw on. I'm assuming they didn't have an Excel IRL so I just added the livery how I thought they might paint one, and the centre panel ended up light blue with black light surrounds.
The MOTGM van is red up to just under the waist rail, then cream, with a red roof. On the Excel the red roof is split with the cream half way up the panel running above the windows, so the cream is still visible enough without it being too cream, and all-red round the destination box. Similarly under the windows there's a thin cream stripe so that it's a proper window 'surround', and cream doors to get the right balance of red/cream on a vehicle with bonded glazing. In the end it looks not to dissimilar to something Barton might've had, if their Excel 2s weren't delivered in route branded liveries.
The first half-&-half is widthways with the MOTGM livery offside and the Bluebird one nearside. No idea if that's what Calum meant but, well, I did it. The MOTGM logo splits the cream from the dark blue on the front, but where the red is against the light blue it did give off a bit of a Home Bargains feel as I was making it! The offside, although you can't see it, would be more or less the mirror image of what the red and cream one looks like.
And then just to see what on earth it would look like, the other half-&-half is front half Bluebird, back half MOTGM, which certainly looks... well it looks something and I don't have the right words for it; not bad, just kinda odd. Again, the MOTGM logo comes to the rescue on the lower bodyside, and the top just has the colours curving up/down as they intersect because the Bluebird already had a curve to it. In a way it reminds me of that Arriva heritage bus with the zip, because it looks like it's being unwrapped from one livery into another.
Top right is my favourite.
Bluebird & MOTGM Excels
These are Optare Excel liveries done for calumrice, of Bluebird 'hi-tech low floor', the Museum of Transport Greater Manchester based off their LDV van, plus half & half variants. Presumably they relate to FD02 SFN in some way, although I just kind of winged it with the front panel and other finer details.
Looking up references for Bluebird, as well as rogue images of American school buses there seemed to be Bluebird, and Blue Bus, that appeared to operate up Manchester way, but I couldn't tell if they were connected or not. Bluebird had this two-tone wavy livery for low floor buses, that was actually quite fun to draw on. I'm assuming they didn't have an Excel IRL so I just added the livery how I thought they might paint one, and the centre panel ended up light blue with black light surrounds.
The MOTGM van is red up to just under the waist rail, then cream, with a red roof. On the Excel the red roof is split with the cream half way up the panel running above the windows, so the cream is still visible enough without it being too cream, and all-red round the destination box. Similarly under the windows there's a thin cream stripe so that it's a proper window 'surround', and cream doors to get the right balance of red/cream on a vehicle with bonded glazing. In the end it looks not to dissimilar to something Barton might've had, if their Excel 2s weren't delivered in route branded liveries.
The first half-&-half is widthways with the MOTGM livery offside and the Bluebird one nearside. No idea if that's what Calum meant but, well, I did it. The MOTGM logo splits the cream from the dark blue on the front, but where the red is against the light blue it did give off a bit of a Home Bargains feel as I was making it! The offside, although you can't see it, would be more or less the mirror image of what the red and cream one looks like.
And then just to see what on earth it would look like, the other half-&-half is front half Bluebird, back half MOTGM, which certainly looks... well it looks something and I don't have the right words for it; not bad, just kinda odd. Again, the MOTGM logo comes to the rescue on the lower bodyside, and the top just has the colours curving up/down as they intersect because the Bluebird already had a curve to it. In a way it reminds me of that Arriva heritage bus with the zip, because it looks like it's being unwrapped from one livery into another.
Top right is my favourite.