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Harley Davidson Motorcycle Drawings and Paintings

This was a commissioned drawing for a guy from Upstate New York. I met with him at his house, met his wife (who is also a huge Harley fan), and they showed me their bikes. I took a few photos from angles I thought would best present the bikes depending on the style and looked around their house for inspiration.

They seemed to have a lot of patriotic decor around their house and being that the drawing would be hung there, it seemed logical to create a background that matched their style.

The entire project took me 150 hours to complete including the custom frame, which you can read more about on my custom framing and matting page.

This is just one example of a motorcycle drawing which hopefully gives you a good idea of how much care and detail I will put into your project. You can contact me for quotes on commissioned artwork by filling out the form on my contact page or if you have a specific idea of what you want, you can fill out my artwork quote form.

Giclee prints are temporarily unavailable! Sorry!

I have high quality giclee prints available for purchase for $250.00. Please contact me directly for current availability and provide your shipping address so I can calculate shipping costs. Matting and framing of your print are available upon request, at an additional cost, just mention all your requests in an email (art@thekerrminator.com) and I'll get back to you within 24 hours. COA's are also available upon request, as well.

How much thought goes into your drawing?

For each of the bikes, I took photos of the three that were available to me and used a combination of photographs to manipulate them into looking like the bikes are all on the same plane. It's very difficult taking four different photos and trying to make all of them look like one. I am happy with how well they look as far as sitting on the same plane. I think the varying angles and which direction the bikes are facing are what makes it work.

There was a lot of planning in the layout of these bikes prior to actually starting. Each bike is a different style and has a different feature that I wanted to really emphasize.

The White Bike . . .

This bike for example, which I believe is a Road Bird (though I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong,) looks like it's more of a classier looking bike with the white-walls, white paint and teardrop mirrors.

Obviously I didn't want to show any of the bikes from a strictly frontal view because it wouldn't show much. I wanted to show this bike's windshield, teardrop mirrors, gas tank, white wall tires and headlights.

I didn't think the exhaust was quite as extravagant on this bike as some of the others, so I didn't think it was as important to show the right side of this bike.

An added difficulty with drawing this motorcycle was that the photos that I had were of varying years and the owner has made several additions and changes to the bike of over the years, So if I like the angle of an older photo, I had to make sure the parts were the newer ones.

The Red Bike . . .

This bike's headlights, dual exhaust, teardrop mirrors and tires are what stood out the most to me so I decided on another view from the side, but showing a bit more of the front because the headlights.

This one I of course showed the right side because of the exhaust. Three out of the four bikes show the right side, because of their exhaust and I just feel that the white bike had the least interesting exhaust and having the one bike facing the opposite direction give the picture variety and an unsymmetrical appearance.

I was conflicted while doing this piece as far as composition goes because what I've always heard while taking art classes is that it's best to have an odd number of objects in a picture. It's more pleasing to the eye, so I had to come up with ways to make four look 'odd.' One way I did that was staggering the angles and facing the white bike the other direction.

The custom painted bike . . .

I think it is quite obvious what features I wanted to show off on this bike. The custom paint job, dual exhaust and beautiful chrome needed to be the center of attention for this bike and there was no better way of doing this other than by a direct side view.

This was the easiest bike to draw and I believe I got it done first. Maybe it was just nice to look at while I was working on it, but that chrome was very satisfying to draw.

This Harley Street Glide was probably my favorite and least favorite. It was the hardest to draw due to the oddly shaped front and I redrew that so many times, I probably spent the most time on this one.

The black bike . . .

It was my favorite style out of all the bikes, but I'm least satisfied with the way this one turned out. The chrome isn't quite as vibrant as the others, but I'm happy with the fact that I finally conquered the shape and got that to work out.

The background I completely made up and I redid twice. I've had a lot of practice drawing fabric so that aspect was easy, but getting the curves of the stripes and stars to look correct was difficult to say the least.

Overall, the background looks somewhat realistic, and I'm very proud of how much I accomplished with this drawing.