Stage 2 of 4
Your bike
The machine in your own garage: how to photograph it, and how each style of bike gets drawn.
There's a gap between liking motorbike art and liking art of a motorbike. A poster of somebody else's machine is decoration. The one in your garage, with the mark on the tank and the cans you fitted yourself, is a portrait. These pages cover both halves of getting there: taking a photograph that's worth drawing from, and what a good drawing of your kind of bike actually looks like.
The reading, in order
- How to photograph your bike
- Motorbike art, and what makes it good
- Art by bike style
- Cafe racer
- Scrambler
- Bobber
- Chopper
- Cruiser
- Tourer
- Adventure
- Sportbike
- Dirt bike
- Classic
What these pages keep concluding
Read the style pages end to end and the same thing keeps happening. Every one of them describes a shape, and then describes a specific machine that wears the shape slightly wrong, which is the bit worth having on a wall. That's what the Paint Shop is for: one photograph of one bike, redrawn rather than filtered, so the aftermarket exhaust and the dent stay in. The preview costs nothing and carries a watermark, so you can decide whether it worked before any money changes hands.
And after that
The stage that follows this one is the gift: Buying for someone who rides, when they already own every tool and two pairs of gloves.
Written by Craig Fearn, Throttlefolio. Last updated .