Our friends at Meta put together one of the most well designed and artistic motorcycle magazines on the market today. Featuring everything from motorcycles to art to history, Meta is a magazine that speaks to what we are all about at Fasthouse. For the past couple issues, we’ve ran a Fasthouse ad, and every time the deadline for ad submission comes around, we put our collective heads together to design something worthy of sitting next to the incredible photography and art direction found inside Meta.

This month’s ad, featuring Fasthouse rider Ikua Hughes railing a rut at a local Southern California track, was very much a collective effort. Artist Scott Dickson worked closely with Creative Director Kenny Alexander to hand paint a photo shot by photographer Brendan Lutes. “When you work with good people it’s easy to do good work,” Kenny said of the final ad.

Dickson put in a lot of hours, meticulously creating the final product that you can see in the pages of Meta Volume 004. And for him, starting with a good image was key. “Kenny asked me to paint the photo like we had done for images before, and the vision quest began,” Dickson said of the process. “The flow of Ikua's style, and the capturing of Brendan's eye, made for an image that was very nice too experience. It was really cool to feel things I haven’t experience in real life, but I imagined as I painted.”

The original photo was taken during a shoot with Ikua for a recent video that can be found here. Lutes spent a couple days with Ikua and snapped this picture at Milestone. “Milestone can be a good track for photos—only if you’re able to find the right angle,” Lutes said. “The background of this photo isn’t as clean as I usually like it—there are banners and poles—but the action is very cool and it came across in Scott’s painting. He did an amazing job of converting the image into something entirely different.”

Be sure to pick up a copy of the latest Meta magazine to see the shot, and so much more. It’s a magazine that can stand the test of time on any coffee table.