The "God of War" bike by Marcus Pfeil

Paint jobs out of the ordinary are quite an average business for Marcus Pfeil. The Austrian artist and custom painter has built himself a reputation in the last few years and is well established among professional airbrush artists in the meantime. His company "Pfeil-Design" has a solid customer base and the order books are filled.

In spite of the wide range of different jobs the "Pfeil-Design" team works on every day, every now and then, they get a job that stands out even there. Just like the Manowar bike, whose painting was ordered by the US true metal band's management.

(...)
Of course, Marcus willingly accepted the job, and the motorbike was transported to the premises of "Pfeil-Design" in Ried, Austria. As a reference, Marcus received the album cover that had been designed by no other than fantasy guru Ken Kelly.

The preparation
After receiving the parts from Pro Bike in Hamburg (it was a kit bike by "Custom Chrome Europe", I was able to start the preparatory work. While a motorbike usually come painted, which leaves the simple task of roughening the varnish with some sand paper and degreasing, this one required several steps more. Here, I had to sandblast, putty, spray liquid polyester, prime, apply the base coat, spray one layer of clear coat and grind it until the surface was perfectly even and mat. By the way - I used a mixture of House of Kolor paint (Magic Blue and some Oriental Blue Kandy among others) as a base coat.

Fig. 1
Time to start the airbrushing where I rely on the HoK range once more. But first, I have to work on my reference and my masking material. The band's management had given me the album cover which required some preparatory steps on the computer before I could print it in black and white and in the size I would require for the gas tank. Then I cut the individual parts from the paper copy with a sharp knife, placed them on the tank and sprayed a layer of heavily thinned Base White over them.

Thus, I ended up with the raw outlines of the figures - some kind of sketch.

Fig. 2
After finishing that one, I continued freehand. I had already decided that I would go on working with transparent paint, so the procedure would be completely different compared to the use of opaque paint on some illustration board. Moreover, my support is a dark one. Therefore, I do just the opposite of what I would do on a light support, I work out the highlights. This picture clearly shows how to spray the figures as a "negative".

With the heavily thinned varnish, I can fully concentrate on my airbrush work as the vast amount of water prevents the pigments from accumulating at the airbrush tip.

Fig. 3
The motive must be adapted to the curvature of the gas tank. I consciously work freehand on this one, because any mask would cause unnatural and ugly hard edges. Whenever I need a hard edge, e.g. for sword blades, I can always use a paper stencil.

Read the whole article in issue 79.

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