By Lori Mai
5 years ago, Misti Collins had never ridden a motorcycle in her life, nor had she painted anything other than a few ceramics with her children.
Now, she is an accomplished, award-winning painter of custom graphics on motorcycles.
For a decade, Misti, a behavioral therapist, and her husband, Jake, a pipefitter, bred and raised quarter horses at their Southwick property. Looking for a different hobby once their adult children left home, they decided on a whim to browse the motorcycles at Lewiston’s Harley Davidson retail store in the summer of 2019.
Intrigued, they signed up for the Idaho Skills Training Advantage for Riders Course.
“We sold our horses, the trailer, just got rid of all of it,” Misti says. “We got our endorsements, bought a couple of bikes, and took our first ride on Highway 101 on the (West) Coast. And we’ve been hooked ever since.”
Their first motorcycles were Harley Softail Heritage Classics—smaller models than full-sized touring bikes. Misti chose 1 that was solid black and ordered custom graphics to suit her style.
“It was beautiful,” she says. “I absolutely loved it.”
A couple of years later after a long bike trip to California, Misti and Jake convinced themselves they needed larger touring motorcycles designed for long-distance rides. They purchased 2 Harley Davidson Road Kings, and again Misti chose a black one to be custom-painted. However, this time, the man who had painted her previous bike wasn’t available.
She contacted another artist from Spokane Valley, but after weeks of chatting back and forth, she felt that he wasn’t interested. She didn’t know where to turn next.
“By that time, I was frustrated,” Misti says. “I wanted my bike painted. And that’s when it all started.”
She watched YouTube videos on motorcycle and automotive painting techniques and talked to experienced professionals in the business from Utah, Pennsylvania, and California who guided her through the process.
“Those guys answered all my questions and got me started,” she says.
To accommodate the necessary space, Jake and Misti modified a vacant house on their property to include a paint booth and work area complete with electricity and heat. She bought an 80-gallon air compressor and loaded up on paint guns and supplies.
Then, without any art background whatsoever, in 2021, Misti embarked on a new venture custom painting motorcycle graphics.
Before she painted her own bike, she experimented on Jake’s original Softail, copying a design she saw on another bike while personalizing it with her own touch. Local motorcycle shops gave her parts to practice on. Soon, she painted for friends and others through word of mouth.
“When I look at a bike, I don’t have a vision of what it should look like,” Misti says. “A lot of it is trying to match the person’s personality without sacrificing my own ideas. I like to have artistic freedom, so it kind of matches my style.”
Misti prefers the “sparkly, pretty, and blingy” styles found on classic lowrider cars. But she paints any type of design a customer wants.
“I try to make it work with the individual person,” she says. “Things that they enjoy but fit them and who they are.”
For Jake’s bike, she decided to use a “dirty hands/clean money” theme to celebrate his blue-collar heritage. For an Irish customer, she’s working on a Celtic theme.
1 of her favorite projects involved painting a sparkly pink Elvis Presley onto a minibike tank, just for fun.
Often, Misti sees a graphic and determines how to incorporate it into the paint. She uses a Cricut machine to make her own stencils and Fineline vinyl tape for the background and sharp edges.
“It’s kind of pulling ideas and styles and then making it my own,” Misti says.
As for her own Road King, she spent many weeks meticulously painting it with a pattern incorporating a floral design from her mom’s tablecloth when she was a child. It won “Best of Show” and “People’s Choice” awards at the Show & Shine event during Lewiston’s annual “Hot August Nights” in 2022, her first year of competition.
Since then, she’s accumulated numerous awards at rallies around the country for her own bike as well as others, including one featuring butterflies that she painted for a friend suffering from a difficult health diagnosis.
Misti is humbly amazed that as a relative newcomer in the field, she has had so much success.
“It’s just that I wanted something done and couldn’t find anyone to do it, so I did it myself,” Misti says. “When I started doing it, I’m like, ‘Hey, I kind of like this. This is good stuff!’ And then seeing people when they pick up their parts or get their bikes put back together, they’re just falling in love with their machine again. It’s very rewarding.”
Eventually, Misti would like to have a shop with a paint booth big enough to fit a full-sized vehicle, so she can work on larger automotive projects. She hopes someday to turn her hobby into a business and see it flourish enough to hire help to do all the tedious prep chores.
In the meantime, Misti works full-time with children as a behavioral therapist, specializing in mental health and equine therapy for Kelley Kids Ranch in Lewiston, on location and through telehealth. It’s an important—yet difficult—job that incurs a large amount of stress.
In therapy, Misti teaches her clients the “art of mindfulness” in dealing with stress, which affirms being mindful of the present, not cluttering the brain with so many things that it’s hard to focus.
“Getting on my bike is my way of being mindful because I cannot focus on anything but what I’m doing on that bike,” she says. “I can’t think about what happened at work. I have to pay attention.”
As such, riding her motorcycle is Misti’s own best therapy.
“But when I can’t ride, painting is my therapy,” she says. “I can lose myself in art and graphics. I turn up my music, and I sing loudly. I’m just doing my own thing. If I’m not riding, I’m painting something, and I’m getting my therapy fill.”