A collaborative project between Black Watts and Trek Bikes.

Project with Black Watts and Trek Bikes. We collaborated with Black Watts to paint three Madones to embody their vision for the 2023 season. The bicycles were each hand-painted by Project One at Trek Bikes.

Black Watts sent over a variety of inspirational images that they were drawn towards. These first two images stood out to me and reminded me of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s free-flowing raw rhythmic style which contributed to the bike design inspiration. With the bikes being hand painted and the inspiration images, we wanted people when they look at the bikes to know they were done by hand versus having clean-cut lines that look machine-made. This was our main theme.

INITIAL CONCEPTS

We wanted to embrace the “hand made” them so we redesigned past Black Watts logos and made additional new ones for the bikes.

FINAL BIKE DESIGN

TEST PAINT SAMPLES

Before painting the bikes, we wanted to explore the paint teams capabilities. Is what we want to create possible? We found past bikes with similar paint brush styles and practiced on test frames the techniques. For the black areas on the frame we decided to leave as raw carbon fiber. When in the sun the carbon fiber materials will show and will make the paint pop since they are contrasting textures.