Keaton Lee once cared for horses. Now she does the same for horsepower.
Lee, who turned 19 in June, runs Crazy K Kustomz, which mainly paints stuff from a booth near Coeur d’Alene, ID. Hard to limit it to that town, though, what with plenty of vacationers and Lee’s Instagram following, which is north of 37,000.
Half her business comes from online. “They ship their parts in, and I ship them back,” Lee said.
Mostly motorcycle parts, but hard to limit that, too. Also trucks, wall art and refrigerators. “I can pretty much paint anything people want custom-painted.”
Refrigerators?
“Vintage ones,” she texted. “People like them in their ‘man caves’ or vacation houses.”
She’s done an electric guitar.
Lee did a low-rider ST for the Harley-Davidson dealership. Custom paint, sold off the showroom floor.
She’s painted her own vehicles, including a first-gen Dodge truck and 1974 Ironhead Harley cut to a chopper: “A really old-school bike, with a kick-start. I personally like the older vehicles, which is why I own them.”
Lee leaves cards with local merchants, ones where people also seeking custom work might be. Tattoo shops are next. She’s done work for vehicles headed to shows. The local paper profiled her.
A year ago, Lee was on a one-hour Zoom podcast with the reality show “All Girls Garage.”
“People treat their bikes as an extension of their body,” she said. “It’s deeply personal, and they pay for doing it well.”
Bikes with a lot of parts -- a bagger motorcycle, say -- could run to the high four figures.
A custom-painted refrigerator.
School Craze
She graduated from Kootenai Technical Education Campus in June 2023, a nearby high school program run by North Idaho College.
Instructor Andy Rogge noted Lee’s unusual self-motivation and artist’s eye, both wrapped in a personality best called vivacious. She dove into painting -- research, new challenges -- grew into it, and is making it her own.
“Always on the move, not any sort of lazy,” he said. “Keeps expanding, trying something new, shows what she can do -- people are going to see that.”
Lee -- painter of bodies four-wheeled, two-wheeled and none -- demurs.
“I wasn’t the best painter,” Lee says. “I’m still not the best painter.”
Rogge said his own passion for custom painting helps him spot it in students. “Find something you love doing, and figure out how to make money doing it.”
Lee connects with others, he said. At a national competition as a student, she “drew a certain type of attention. Snap-On wanting to interview her -- partly for being the girl, but it was her personality.”
Rogge called her family “so awesome” in their support of Lee. “They let her go how she wanted, gave her what she needed to do it.”
They’d been living in Washington, Lee recalled, and on turning 16, she’d gotten a job with an upholsterer. COVID hit, her high school was “doing nothing,” and the family moved to Idaho.
Lee with her dogs, Smokey, top, and Bandit, bottom.
Lee had to quit that first job and the KTEC class was full. She wangled her way in, and discovered painting.
Her parents are at their Idaho digs. Keaton lives with her brother, Walker, who owns a truck he’s started a small business with, hauling dirt for construction. She’s got two dogs: Smokey and Bandit, the former being her “shop dog” who goes to work with her.
Her continuing education has taken her to California and Arizona.
“Pretty much like a class, 15 people or so, custom painters all painting something that weekend. We learn from each other, meet a lot of people,” for networking, she said.
Pinstripe Prime
“Once you learn the main part of painting, and the custom side, it’s mostly tips and tricks,” Lee said. “I have a lot of questions and you’re meeting people you can talk with in the future.”
That future is happening one fridge at a time.
She shares space with another restorer, who does body work. She brings her own work to the site -- at first, too much of it.
“I gave myself some pretty tight deadlines,” she said, working through weekends.
She’s slowed her pace a bit, but “I’m still new, I have to do everything.”
The business is developing the way a job itself does, as Rogge explained.
“You may have an idea of what you want, but by the time you start taping it, and working with the shape of the panel, it starts to develop. She has an idea and she starts rolling with it and lets it design itself.”
Like a specific job, too.
While still a student, Lee took on a 1970s Suburban, Rogge recalled. Challenging “even for seasoned painters, she took it and didn’t let the size scare her.”
Lee marks out pinstriping as an illustrative challenge.
“Hand pinstriping takes a long time to learn: keeping the lines straight, the paint thinned out, the way you turn a brush to make corner.”
Why do it, then?
It’s another challenge.
“There’s pinstripe art, so if you learn how, if I can get confident at it, I can set up a pop-up booth at car shows and just paint.”
Paul Hughes