Project Art Bike

About two years ago I had an idea for doing an "art bike". I was chatting with one of my good friends on the phone and she asked if I'd ever considered the idea of commissioning an artist to paint (as in with a brush) one of my frames.  My personal fine art skills are not very impressive, so I quickly ruled out the idea of me painting the bike. Without that piece of the puzzle, I moved on to other projects and forgot about the art bike. [wooslider slide_page="post-project-art-bike" slider_type="slides"] Several months ago, I was looking at the my mouse pad (it's the coolest mouse pad in the world) which also happens to be one of my favorite paintings. The artist who painted it just happens to be my cousin, Gregory Beylerian. He did a portrait of Einstein that I fell in love with, so for my birthday he had a mouse pad made for me with that painting on it. Staring at the mouse pad, the art bike project came flooding back into my mind. I had never mentioned the art bike project to my cousin, but in the back of my mind I had been hoping to recruit an artist to help me with this project. Instead one just dropped into my lap! Here was one of my favorite artists and on top of that we're family, so he couldn't say no, right? After describing the project to my cousin, he agreed. His style of art is PERFECT for this project, as you can see here . The Predator team and I got a bike all ready for him in true "Pegoretti" style, and let him do his magic. I had mixed feelings on how it was going to turn out—we had never finished a bike this way before and it was more than a litte scary. There are a lot of costs into a frame like that from our perspective, and knowing he was going to put a large amount of hours into the project as well didn't help. All this, and we didn't even know if it was going to work! A few weeks later he brought the frame over. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not easy impressed, yet all i could say was WOW! Never in a million years did I think he would reach the level of detail that he did. It is HOT! In fact, the only thing that I didn't like about the whole situation is that I don't get to keep the bike! Following the completion of the bike, we scheduled a photo shoot with a professional model. Being a part of the photo shoot was amazing. We took the bike, the model and two stylists (one for the model and one for the bike) down to Venice Beach to shoot. Check out the results below.