MyCanyon: Principles of Paint
The frame designs and paint jobs for MyCanyon are the most complex and ambitious we have ever conceived. Senior Graphic Designer Lukas Beck has led the charge from start to finish.
My background is in building DIY bikes and painting them. I used to make lots of Tall Bikes [for which two conventional bicycle frames are connected by welding, brazing, or other means, one atop the other] and we had a little team of friends competing in fixie races too. We would drive around Germany in our VW Bully bus, showing up wherever we could find a start line.
The first thing I do when I look at a custom or special bike design is unwrap the surfaces of the tubes. That means ‘exploding’ the frame and considering the bikes as 2D and flat, rather than 3D. Back in the day, I would wrap a bike with pieces of adhesive foil, then cut them to shape, unpeel them, stick them on a big piece of paper, and scan it in. It was a pretty DIY unwrapping method! Now I go to the bike designers and engineers, and they can explode the surface of the bike from their computer design as a 2D file.
I design the frame artworks using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. It’s amazing how much you can do in the software - I paint using my computer, essentially. For example, with the MyCanyon frames, I created special Photoshop paint brushes that exactly mimic the different techniques that our paint factory can do. I also recreate the different layers of paint that the factory applies step by step. This all means that my final mockup is extremely similar to the final painted frame. That’s something I’m really proud of.
Paint is my passion. I’m a member of an international paint collective, which has people from all sorts of industries in it. We meet up once a year for a conference and share ideas and new techniques. I love to see what’s possible, and how far we can go with the designs by bringing them to life with special pigments and creative methods.
The bike is a canvas. When I collaborate with other designers or painters, I encourage them to play around. Mess up our logo? Why not? Forget the corporate design for a minute, go crazy. Let’s put it upside down. Whatever. Everything is possible, this isn’t a limited-edition bike for a team where logos have to be in certain places. With a custom paint job, everything is possible.
Pushing our suppliers is important. For MyCanyon, and most other custom paint jobs, I have to push back a lot. The factory has strict rules on what they think is a ‘failure’ in terms of quality control, and they want to avoid that (which is fair enough), but often my techniques and designs require something that feels different, more granular, even alive. But that’s precisely what makes the MyCanyon frames look so great, in my opinion.
The complexity of the MyCanyon paint jobs is incredible. It was a great journey to see the possibilities, and work with our suppliers to produce the most beautiful frames we’ve ever made. But it’s not easy. Take the Felipe Pantone ‘Opus’ frame. There are four intricate layers of paint, baked each time. It takes our factory so much longer than standard frames to paint. I asked them to rate the frame out of 10 in terms of difficulty. They said: ‘twelve’.
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