MATT FARAH
HELMETS FOR THE SMOKING TIRE
Matt Farah (The Smoking Tire)
I met Matt while living in Los Angeles back in 2011. I was designing automotive apparel for a start up company that he was involved with. My wife and I quickly became friends with him over BBQ and were able to see his career grow from its early stages.
Trump Helmet
Matt is extremely quick witted and loves a good joke. I received text messages one night (actually about 2am) about how ridiculous Donald Trump’s hair looked on The Apprentice. This is long before Trump’s presidency. I was floated the idea of painting Trump’s head on to Matt’s open face helmet. How could I say no to that?
I rendered a design up in photoshop. This was something that was never meant to see the light of day, but it’s worthwhile to show how ridiculous the idea was. I simply took a photo of Trump’s head and added a helmet template on top.
The paint job was slightly more cartoonish, but really drove the point home. I hand painted the helmet using all House of Kolors paint, completely freehand with Iwata airbrushes.
Homer Helmet
During Trump’s presidency, Matt decided to change things up a bit. It was a quick conversation, but something I feel stood out much better than the original helmet. How can you go wrong with a Simpson’s character?
The design was put together entirely in illustrator, then used in production. All piece of the design were vector and either cut as a mask on a plotter or printed on a Roland printer. The paint was House of Kolor.
