Page 121 - Decadence

To say Piers Dowell paints helmets would be over simplifying to the enth degree... Piers is an artist, his choice of weapon is the airbrush and his style is hyper realism. When I met him nearly a year ago at the Autosport show in Birmingham, I already knew his work and I’d certainly seen a lot of helmets he had done, even if I didn’t know it.
It took nearly a year to take him up on his offer to visit his studio, partly because of our ridiculous schedule and partly because he was building an extension to his studio. Based just outside the market town of Leominster his studio is a cluster of purpose built sheds that would get Henry Cole’s juices running. Piers
meets us dressed in white paper overalls and shows us past the spray booth, which is a custom built booth, like you would see a good car body spray shop, but smaller. He jokes that he didn’t want a full size booth so he couldn’t spray cars if people asked him...
The main studio is a well lit purpose built unit with all round bench space, where he and his side kick Lewis painstakingly mask and paint some of the most impressive designs on helmets, but the rst thing I notice when I walk through the door is a motorcycle tank and mudguard, all masked and ready to paint.
Piers, 48, wanted to nd a way of combining his two passions, art and motorcycles, so he was painting bikes for customers inspired by the American Chopper phenomenon. But it was racing driver Martin Stretton who suggested Piers paint some helmets and that’s where it started, Martin introduced him to Demon Tweaks, the car tuning shop, run by Jon and Alan Minshaw, both gentlemen racers with Jon being one of the top contenders in British GT, so Piers was able make a living from custom helmets. When Mark Higgins, the rally driver introduced Piers to Stillo, the helmet manufacture all the planets were starting to align. The Stillo helmets work particularly well in custom painting as we are shown in the studio. They can be totally stripped of all the trim and padding (where as an Arai, for instance, is bonded so you have to mask the interior padding).
Piers has now painted over 3000 helmets, since 1991 and has always taken the approach of working to a quality rather than a price. Although
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