Throttlefolio

Motorcycle Art by Bike Style

Every bike style has its own line. The cafe racer reads as a gesture, the bobber as a silhouette, the adventure bike as a plan. Pick the style you ride, and each page covers what that shape is to draw and how a photo of yours would come out.

Five different motorcycle silhouettes backlit against a glowing dusk sky.

These pages are organised by style, not by manufacturer. That was deliberate. Two riders on the same model can want completely different pictures, because they've built and ridden it differently. A roadster run as a stripped-back cafe racer wants the single-line ink treatment. The same base bike built as a bobber wants a low, heavy silhouette instead. Match the drawing to how the bike is actually put together, rather than to the badge on the tank, and it lands.

Where the style names come from

Nobody official, is the short answer. There's no standards body for motorcycle styles, so every name on this page is a word the sport settled between itself. The types of motorcycle page goes into that properly, including the one categorisation UK law does make, which is by power rather than by shape. Read it if you want to place a rider's machine before choosing a picture of it.

Ten styles, one process

The mechanism is the same on every one of them. Send one photo of the bike through the Paint Shop, choose a style, and the preview is free and watermarked so you can judge it before spending anything. The photo guide covers the two minutes before you press the shutter, which matter more than the camera does. Where a style has original artwork of its own in the collection, the page says so and links it.

Next

A lean cafe racer motorcycle with clip-on handlebars parked on a quiet cobbled backstreet at dawn.

Cafe racer →

If you had to draw a motorcycle from memory, it'd probably come out as a cafe racer. Clip-ons, a long tank, a humped single seat and nothing it doesn't need. The shape reads as a gesture, which is exactly why it suits ink.