No. 321: Indian Chief Vintage (and a blonde)

No. 321, "Pam and her Indian" by Tom Wills, January 2016, colored pencil

Sometimes you just have to climb on board, grip the throttle and get moving.
Even if you might need a kick start ...

This big illustration is a colorful experiment that worked, once we got it going.
The persistent guy from my last blog, who convinced me to do all of those horse and cat and dog illustrations, also wanted a motorcycle.
He and his lady friend are into big bikes as well as horses, as are many of their friends.
 

Vroooooooooooooom!

But there were a few catches to making this picture a reality:
First, I had to morph two pictures together to make it look like the woman actually is riding this particular bike, an Indian Chief Vintage. (In the original photo, she is simply sitting on the big machine.)
Second, it had to be in colored pencil.
Um, colored pencil?  "That's a new one on me," I said.
"Try it," he urged. "You can do it."

I had a gigantic box full of broken and gnarled colored pencils, left over from my kids and pretty much for my grandson's use. I really lucked out one night at Walgreen's and snagged a new box of 100 colors for $9 -- mispriced (should have been like $24), but they sold it to me anyway.
So I was soon off and running!

"Leather." -- Frank Zappa.

We wanted the illustration to look realistic, but knew that it wouldn't be like a painting.
It was the chrome that proved the most challenging, because it had to look like sparkling silver -- not just blue, white and gray. I labored over the chrome and leather.
And the glass windscreen -- trying to make it appear transparent.
Those blue jeans look like denim, too.
The boots turned out leather-y.
Also, see how the light is reflected off of the front fender and gas tank?
Cool.

I worked with a few motorcycle pictures provided to me, and a few more Indian bike shots from the internet. And my pal used his neighbor as a leg model to get the posture right. Seriously!
What we ended up with is, I think, a natural enough pose of a woman on a very big bike, with a lot of chrome.
The motor was a challenge because it had been obscured by her original (non-riding) pose.  I used stock photos from Indian to draw the power plant -- and etched it with " Indian Motorcycle Co."
More chrome!

Chrome and glass

The framed finished product had been stashed since January and was given as a birthday gift on April 29, as her motorcycle pals gathered at a Mahoning County restaurant. Great effort was taken to keep this a total surprise for three months!

Motorcycles, and machines in general,  are very complicated drawings. Blending a human onto them just adds to the challenge.

But this is the second motorcycle that I have done, so I had a template to follow.  The first big bike was for a friend of mine who was celebrating his 50th birthday.  That one was in black and white, just plain pencils.
But I still captured that sparkle.

Hi Dennis. Miss you.

Here are a few more looks at the Indian motorcycle sketch as it developed: