Pit Stop: Amanda Brisebois from Black Widow Custom Paint
- Zach Janik
- Jul 29
- 6 min read
The bikes Amanda paints belong to guys who want flames, skulls, and no deviation from the reference photo. Most of the bikes Amanda rides are nothing like that at all. Her current one is a hot pink zebra-striped Ducati Scrambler, ombre tank from pink to purple. The bikes she cannot take anywhere without somebody stopping her to ask who did the paint. The answer, of course, is her.
Amanda will tell you flames are her bread and butter, that she can lay a set down in her sleep, and that ninety percent of what pays the bills is restorative work with no wiggle room in it.
But then she'll tell you her own helmet is a fish head.
That her favorite job this year was a monster helmet for the hand built show in California, and that her personal mission, more or less, is "taking the badass out of riding."
Welcome back to Pit Stop, the corner of American Moto Co. where we pull over to explore the craft, the culture, and the creators who keep the raw, unfiltered soul of motorcycling alive. Today we're catching up with Amanda of Black Widow Paint, an airbrush artist out of Ontario who I came across the way most people do, staring at one of her bikes online.
Amanda did not ease into this. "I was born on a bike," she says, and she means it close to literally, she had an 80cc Yamaha kick-start dirt bike before she ever had a bicycle. Her dad ended up with what she affectionately called "a bucket of daughters," so he quietly elected one of them to be the son he never had, and she took the job. He'd bring her out to construction sites and run her through maneuvers on the little bike.
The early bikes came the way most things in Amanda's life come, sideways, by accident, falling into her lap. The very first was a machine her dad pulled out of a snowbank in rural Nova Scotia for four hundred bucks, then restored alongside her until she was old enough to legally ride it. After that came a Kawasaki 440 LTD, which eventually "decided to bite the bullet." Her next bike arrived when a woman offered to sell her Suzuki Intruder to pay for a paint job, and Amanda, sensing an opportunity, suggested they cut out the middleman. Amanda just took the bike.
She didn't love the Intruder. At five-foot-two on a good day, the cruiser geometry, the forward controls, the leaned-back seating, none of it fit. So naturally, in the way that makes perfect Amanda sense, she went and bought a Suzuki DR 650, a dirt bike so tall it shouldn't have fit her at all. "That bike could climb trees, man," she says, and for the brutal, spine-rattling rides out to family in Ottawa, it was exactly right.
These days she wanted something she could flat-foot in city traffic, something light she could push around like a bicycle and still keep up with everyone. She shopped Triumphs, found them too heavy, and then a Ducati Scrambler came up for sale. She tried it. She fell in love.
Ducati’s are famous for needing a lot of upkeep and she's not a mechanic herself, but Amanda is not worried about it, because she married her mechanic. It’s important to know though, her husband was NOT a rider when they met but for a while their dates were a genuine competition with her bike for her attention. "Well, see ya, sucker, I'm going for a ride." So he got his license to keep up, caught the bug hard, and went from a guy with zero ride time to a guy who rebuilds motorcycles for fun. Now there's nothing on a bike he can't fix, which makes him the best tech a Ducati owner could ask for, conveniently located in her own house.
Which brings us to the engagement. He told her he had a thousand dollars: go pick out whatever ring she wanted. So she went to the jeweler, found the cheapest ring in the place, and asked if she could put the rest of the balance toward a new set of shocks for her bike. She could. Dear reader, I need you to know this girl loves motorcycles.
Every time I do one of these, my main goal is to collect a story from the road, and my only coaching is that it should be a story that will be on your mind for the rest of your life. Amanda immediately told me it was a hailstorm.
She was soaked within three seconds, in the dark, lightning flashing everywhere, riding home in a quarter helmet that left her choosing between rain hitting her face like needles or pulling a bandana over her mouth and waterboarding herself. The whole way home she figured she might die. But the high that comes after surviving a rip through a hailstorm convinced her she could ride through anything.
The reason she found herself riding through a hailstorm is the best part. She wasn't finishing an epic ride, or barely getting to the driveway before gas ran out. No, she was at her parents' house, perfectly warm, perfectly dry, and she did not want to spend the night. Her husband, the great cook, was making dinner. So she chose the hailstorm.
Like we mentioned before, Amanda's life tends to be driven by accidents, typically unplanned and falling into her lap. See, Amanda wanted to be a doctor, believe it or not. Blood and guts, no problem, lose a finger and she'll calmly put it back on for you. But she's a sympathy vomiter, so she pivoted to art school, figuring she'd come out an animator or an illustrator.
What actually happened is she kept riding her own painted bike to class and people kept asking who painted her bike. She kept saying I did and that is where the commissions started, she was nineteen and charging pennies because she had no idea what things cost, and pretty soon she was making more money messing around with an airbrush than at her two actual jobs. She graduated ready to be a working artist and discovered you apparently need twenty years of experience to get hired as one. So she fell back on the airbrush, and the airbrush took off.
She came up the hard way, too. When she started airbrushing, YouTube had nothing, as she puts it she "sucked for a solid eight years" before it clicked. These days a kid can Google any of it. She points newcomers to channels like Time Warp Customs and tells them how good they have it.
Amanda has rules. No nudity, she has lost count of the men who've asked her to airbrush their girlfriend as a topless mermaid, then emailed the reference photos unprompted. No violence. And no club iconography. She'll happily paint a club member's bike whatever color he wants "some of the nicest people I've ever met were Hells Angels," she notes. She just won't put a club logo on anything and tie her name to it.
What she actually lives for is the weird stuff. Karting helmets for kids have become her favorite thing. She's done a pizza-slice helmet. An axolotl helmet. An eyeball helmet.
For the Handbuilt Moto Show she built a monster: eyeballs everywhere, teeth across the visor, a brain in the back. Comic-book energy, that is the deeply unserious work is the lane she wants to live in.
But there is a big dream hiding inside her creative work, the dream is to get the call: a BMW or a Ducati handing her a bike and saying do your thing for a limited run. Or a Formula One helmet, she points to the wild stuff that's shown up on the grid and would love a shot at it.
During our interview I told her, the single most undervalued move a talented person can make is to simply say out loud what they're after. Put "I want to paint a limited BMW run" or "I want to do an F1 helmet" into the world and you would be stunned how many doors open.
Maybe by universe we mean social media, or a blog. Either way… it's in the world now.
