Elegant Tech Art

If you've read the Service department in Cycle World over the last couple of years, you've seen the superb technical illustrations drawn by Jim Hatch. Each month, Jim provides a simple but elegant piece of art that helps readers more easily comprehend my explanation of some aspect of motorcycle design or function. He produces those illustrations on a Macintosh computer at his home studio in Santa Barbara, California, where he also keeps his eclectic quartet of motorcycles—a Ducati 900SP, a 25th Anniversary Honda VFR800, a Honda Nighthawk 700S and a Yamaha WR400F.

As a misguided youth growing up in New Jersey, Jim not only loved cars and motorcycles but also proved to have considerable artistic talent. He parlayed those natural creative skills into a scholarship at the Otis Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles, followed by a stint as art director for the Petersen Automotive Museum, also in Los Angeles, before he decided to open his own studio.

Though the artwork Hatch provides for Service is beautifully crafted, it only hints at the size, the scope and the diversity of the work he routinely cranks out for other clients in the motorcycle industry, including the likes of Honda, Yamaha, Buell (shown), Dunlop tires and ICON riding gear. He also creates posters for the famous Monterey Historic automobile races, technical illustrations for Kohler, commemorative art for the In-N-Out hamburger chain and drawings in a broad range of styles for numerous other well-known companies and events.

If you'd like to see more of Hatch's work, log onto his website at www.hatchillustration.com and check out the wide variety of stunning art that includes bike and car cutaways, vehicle see-throughs, event posters, corporate logos and much more. It's a short trip well worth taking.