Illustration work by Brian-Rey Ejar

Introducing... The Bassi Coyote!

Bassi Montreal's first ATB, designed by co-owner Roberto Apolinar, inspired by his ride on the Baja Divide and influenced by his 2006 Jamis hardtail. I had the pleasure of drawing this beautiful bike's decals. Thanks Bobby!

Photos by Emiliano Quesada, from C&L Cycle's website.

Did you know?
Coyotes are such sound sleepers, it's a major cause for their demise in the wild.

Preliminary sketches

Bobby was going for something reminiscent of all-terrain trucks from the 80s. Think Bronco, but nimble and on two-wheels. Plus, he wanted to pull inspiration from Latinx market signs, as a nod to his heritage.

I would eventually send in this. Codename: Mud. It's an all-terrain bike, so I imagined the coyote running thru the word, and then I imagined the word as if it were made of mud. All terrain, ergo, visa vie. Voila.

Then I overlayed the image on top of the bike prototype, and highlighted areas I wanted to populate.

Scrapped decals

One of the decals we decided to ditch was this quote based on a Donald Glover-line from the show, Community.

Kept the "Par Bassi". Lost the glasses.

Maybe we'll see these fork blade decals in the future?

We agreed that maintaining uniformity across the Bassi line would likely be best, so we ditched this mod. Notice the "t" in "Montreal". It's a cross, like the one on Mont Royal.

Scrapped headset design.

Bike Colors

We flirted with a number of colorways from an old bike paint swatch catalog CL Cycle had. This was one of my initial pitches, with the scrapped decals, in an 80s Yeti Cycle-inspired colorway.

This is the colorway I initally wanted, with the extra decals, in lavender, inspired by the 1994 Fat ChanceYo Eddy. We decided no on it (for now?) because what we eventually landed on was so much stronger, especially released together.