A Lil Sass

Process Diary

This one was fun. After the heavy pieces I wanted a portrait that got to be a portrait — somebody standing in front of their bike with an attitude, not a machine photographed like evidence. She is planted centre frame with her legs apart, left hand up throwing the horns, and the black HJC has cat ears bolted to the top in purple, which is the detail that told me who she was before I had drawn anything else. The boots took the longest: high heels, black, laced in bright purple down to a purple heel, and they are the reason the pose works, because nothing stands like that unless the boots say so. Jacket black with white side panels, riding pants plain — after the boots everything else had to keep quiet and let them talk. Behind her the Ninja sits white with blue and black graphics, angled away but close enough to read as hers. The wall is orchid, a flat lilac I would never use anywhere else, with a grid of thin black lines pulled tight across it like graph paper or a chain-link gone abstract, so the whole picture sits on a surface instead of in a place. Then the glitch trails off her shoulders and the bike in cyan, magenta and yellow, and the flat dark ground underneath to stop it floating. Drawn fast, drawn happy, and it shows. That is the piece.