You’ve all seen the motorcycles with flames and skulls or Batman emblems. Each of these bikes has been painted with great care and skill. These are definitely not your paint-by-numbers patterns for the do-it-yourselfer.
Many people like to have their bikes personalized with graphics that show off their true inner spirit or the one they’d like us to believe they possess. The most popular graphic design that I have seen in my travels and at Bike Week would have to be, hands-down, the flame design. There are blue flames, red flames, green flames, flames with skulls in them, flames with dragons in them and the list is endless. Second on the list is the skull. I’m not sure what the fascination with skulls is, but they are very popular, and as mentioned work well with the flame motif.
Every now and again, though, you get someone who doesn’t like to follow the crowd but instead marches to her own drummer. At the metric bike show thrown by the Rat’s Hole at Bike Week there was a large variety of paint jobs in the rather small showing of 60 bikes. My personal favorite was the guy who painted his bike with desert camouflage incorporating all branches of the military onto the bike. I loved that he had a tank on it as well. He was overhead saying that he did two tours in the Iraqi Freedom war and that some of his friends didn’t come back the artwork was a tribute to them.
There was a bike that had the Batman emblem on the fenders and a bike that had headlights that looked like skeletons with graphics behind them. One paint scheme that I found particularly interesting was the woman who had a white Harley-Davidson with pink flames!
Of course, my old man has to be on the cutting edge of all things a custom bike needs. This of course translates into expensive. Before Daytona he had tribal graphic decals on the bike. Don’t think those decals were a whole lot cheaper than paint, as they weren’t.
Too many of his friends were telling him that the decals looked cheap, right Stacey? So after wandering around all day he finally spotted a guy doing hand-painted pinstriping. This was 4 in the afternoon. Of course he had to check out the samples in the book, look at the work on display around the tent and start a conversation with the owner.
I don’t know how many of you remember “Gilligan’s Island” (not the bar in Daytona, the TV show). The theme song was something about a “three-hour tour” which turned into being stranded on this island. Well, that’s what it felt like for this paint job, as Laura and Darren both quipped.
Darren is a transplanted New Yorker from Buffalo. He and his wife moved to Central Florida to escape the constant shoveling and be near Laura’s family. He has three other brothers, and all four of them do pinstripe painting. He said that his one brother back in Buffalo was telling him how he had to close down because of the weather being so cold. Meanwhile, Darren is painting en plein aire in Florida and gets much more time to paint than he did back in Buffalo.
Once the old man told Darren what he wanted, we were told it would take about two hours to do the work after they had taken off the old decals. This process went much smother than you might think. After that was complete, Darren washed the bike with a thinner then masked out the tank, fenders, fairings, etc. before he hand drew the tribal graphics on each part. Then he removed the tape and began painting the background. This was done with chrome silver paint and then outlined, again freehand, with jet black paint.
You begin to see now why it took almost five hours to complete the painting. Like any good salesman, Darren knew that once he started painting, the buyer was hooked no matter how long it took to do the job.
At 9:30 pm and just in time for the next day’s metric show, the old man had a new paint job, one that shouldn’t be made fun of. If you want to personalize your bike with art, remember that the person who you want to sell the bike to may not have your same taste.
Check around for good graphic artists in this area. I know that the guys at Death Row Custom bikes are getting ready to open a custom painting shop at their place in Drums in the next month or so. If you want to show the world your inner spirit, get a custom paint job and show us your demon.
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