HERNAN D’ALOIA

I’m originally from Argentina. I came here at the age of five years and was raised in Los Angeles. I first got into lowriders at 12 years old. I used to tell my dad when I was a kid I was going to airbrush lowriders, but that didn’t fall in place. I started engraving on lowrider bicycles and that led into cars and eventually motorcycles. I’ve been engraving for 18 years and self-employed since 2003.

Lately, the lowrider style of engraving has transferred from cars to motorcycles. I think it has to do with the custom paint jobs that everybody has been doing. People started incorporating the paintwork, along with the murals, with engraving to achieve the full look of a lowrider-style car paint job on a motorcycle. To my knowledge, there has been engraving on choppers since the early ’70s. It was around on the motorcycles for years, but nowadays, it seems to have a bigger following from the lowrider community, at least from my perspective.

I started to see the trend climb again after the Biker Build-Off shows. Tay

Herrera did some hand engraving on Trevelen’s bikes and Jesse James and so forth. It started really taking momentum. Guys like Covington’s Cycles and other builders started adding engraving. Then the lowrider paint style started taking a bigger role, and like a tumbleweed it kept getting bigger and bigger.

When I started in California I had clients in Miami. Then it moved to Covington’s in Oklahoma, then Texas, Las Vegas, and now I have clients all over the world, including Japan, China, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Russia.

I think the growth has also come from a lot of guys seeing it on social media. Today you can see it with a click on your phone, where 10 years ago, we had to log on to the internet to see if anybody posted any kind of video, get a DVD from an underground guy, or see it on TV. Social media took it to another level with instant messages, instant pictures, and instant downloading. You can be on Facebook or Instagram Live and cover all your angles for your business, unless you really don’t want it.

I’ve always had my own website, since day one when no one had one. From that I gained a lot of social media followers. When MySpace, Facebook came out, people followed me. Instagram has been a minor gold mine. It keeps me on a one-onone basis with very high-end people.

Engraving today will follow just like any other trend. It was big in the ’70s on the choppers then it came back in the 2000s, and now it’s starting to come around because people are engraving every part of the motorcycle. Engraving should be like an accessory to the bike, not overkill on the paint, chrome, or other accessories. I think it might start declining a little bit, and people will start to be subtler. Eventually, it’s going to get to the point where every bike is engraved just like the next guy—unless a client wants one-off custom engraving. It costs more because it’s a lot more layout and engraving time. It all depends on how the customer wants to portray the art on his bike. HB