The paintwork covering the frames coming out of the Santa Barbara workshop of Stinner Frameworks has been blowing minds lately; it’s the work of James Bellerue — in-house designer and Head of Paint, and this ‘tigerstyle’ is one of his latest pieces.
Of course, the initial concept came from the customer, who wanted the stripes of Panthera Tigris in matte green laid over a black base, topped with the Stinner logotype in orange. James injected life into a beast that’s destined to roam the hills of Los Angeles.
James studied art at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, before making the move to Santa Barbara. After working in bike shops around the area he became acquainted with Aaron Stinner who was willing to teach him some framebuilding skills.
The Stinner workshop continued to grow and seeing as James had a background in art, Aaron asked James if he wanted to try his hand at painting and now, with Stinner bikes in high demand all over the world, James is the man responsible for their superb liveries.
He had this to say about the background to this particular design:
“Our customers are amazing and we constantly inspire each other. In this case, we had decided a color direction when I got an e-mail from my co-worker Jeremy relaying: “The customer wants to see what a tiger-stripe treatment would look like”.
“There’s always a million ways something like that could go but I immediately thought ‘let’s make Rambo’s cross bike’. I felt an overall pattern would be better than emulating more realistic stripes, I wanted the tiger to be obvious but not to look exactly like one.
“We’re pretty stoked with the results. At the end of the day you have to pay to play, and all those stripes had to get pulled off after masking. All said and done just the masking/unmasking of the stripes took about 4 hours.
Stinner frames aren’t just popular for James’ paintwork, of course. They’ve a highly regarded reputation for solidly built, straight-up machines for duelling with asphalt or off-road terrain; a result of the work by a dedicated team of professionals.
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Massive thanks to Mark Edwards, Nicole Datlen and James Bellerue at Stinner Frameworks, and Matthew Christopher Miller for the awesome photos.
