Fallen Star

Process Diary

A 2007 V-Star 650, customized, and I would not draw it the polite way. Every photograph of a motorcycle is taken from the height of a standing person, which is the one angle where a bike looks like furniture. So I put myself on the ground, under the front wheel, and let the perspective do the rest: the tire comes down enormous in the left of the frame and everything behind it gets smaller and tilts away, so the machine reads like something arriving rather than something parked. That is the whole joke of the name. V-Star. A star that came down — and I wanted to catch it in the second before it lands. The tank keeps its red because the red is the bike's actual color; I moved it into the background as a full field and then laid a black filigree silhouette over it, all that scrollwork standing in for the dark, and hung the glowing rings behind the whole thing like ripples coming off a heat source, or sonar. The headlight is cream, not white, because it should look lit even though nothing is on. Mechanical greys on the forks and engine, honest as I could make them, so the drawing still knows what a motorcycle is. Low, red, and falling toward you. That is the portrait.