Sketch for Lucky Bike Painting

A woman who admired my “Dixie Drive Thru” painting asked if I could “do something” with her son’s bike shop, also on Poinsett Highway. I took a look and immediately saw the possibilities. Lucky Bike is a quirky little place with a story and style all its own. I like that!

Although I haven’t yet met the man, she said her son is an avid cyclist who has competed around the globe, including Cambodia where he met “Lucky” Samnang Meas, a National Cycling Champion and inspiration for Lucky Bike. He bills the place as a “recycle shop”, taking old and often unloved bikes and turning them into useful refurbished products at reasonable prices. But recycling bicycles is apparently only the beginning. According to his Facebook page, he’s recycled almost everything in the place including, “work bench, desk, chairs, display cases, and of course, bicycles”. And the building. And the building is what most interested me.

It’s an old quonset hut, formerly a body shop, formerly condemned. I like what he’s done to the place. I like the design challenge making a painting of it poses. As I said, the place is quirky. But it’s not pretty. He hasn’t quite made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, as my mother used to say, but he’s taken what he had and used some clever design to make a strong, happy statement. He’s used a basic design technique of taking the most glaring problem and turning it into the strongest asset. He’s taken the chopped semi-circle shape of the front of the hut and painted it to signify the rim of a bike wheel. And he’s asserted his decision with the strongest palette possible: black on yellow. The result is striking.

This is the central theme of my design for the painting; a chopped semi-circle in yellow and black. Everything else revolves this. It seemed best to present the building straight on, showing no perspective, keeping the design clean and simple. As with “Dixie”, I’ll do the painting on a variety of surfaces overlapping each other to create an asymmetrical silhouette. A square background panel to the left anchors the chopped semi-circle’s hard thrust toward the right. The painting of the background is more an impressionistic indication of the real shop’s environment. I’ve taken liberties: moved the tree closer to the building, removed a couple of phone poles, severely shortened the size of the side yard. The soft purples and greens on this panel are in counter-point to the strident yellow and black. It’s all done in service of the center of attention.

The above Prismacolor drawing is the final sketch before starting the painting. This is gonna be fun!