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There are so many panels on this Suzuki Intruder 1800 that it was always going to be a huge project. Many cruisers only have a petrol tank and two fenders. This enormous machine has panels coming out of its ears and customer Paul Ayres wanted a scheme which incorporated various horror film characters across all of them. To bind it all together he asked for a texture of skin and muscle, similar to the character in 'Hellraiser' who had no skin for a large part of the film.

Once the skin texture had been airbrushed onto the panels, I worked the character likenesses over the top, merging them in with the skin texture to help blend everything together.

With such a large amount of space to cover, this was a very long job. Thanks to Paul for bearing with me whilst I completed of the artwork. I'm particularly pleased with the Freddy and Jason side profiles on either side of the petrol tank.

This was the first time I had used Auto Air and E'tac water based airbrush paints and I really enjoyed using them. It's nice to work in an environment without lots of solvent fumes wafting about, although it is still advisable to use a mask. I found E'tac in particular an excellent paint to used for very fine detail, although I understand Auto Air now have a new range which is supposed to be very good in that regard, so I'm looking forward to using it on future projects.

All the panels were given several good coats of clear before being wet sanded and polished. Thanks to Carlton at Ride Moto for re-fitting all the panels for me, as well as fitting a new exhaust system and Power Commander for the customer whilst we had the bike here at Carnaby.

We took the bike back down to Paul in Swindon once it was completed and re-assembled, with plenty of the summer left for him to show if off in. A huge project for me, but good results for everyone involved. At the time I completed it, there were only one or two of these new shape Intruders that had been custom painted, so Paul has a fairly unique machine to ride around on now.

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