- Artist Joshua Vides has turned real classic cars into 2D-style sketch pieces.
- Flat Out exhibition is running at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.
- Display features Mercedes, Porsche and Ferrari models inside a matching mock garage.
Some car designs start life as sketches.
Artist Joshua Vides has taken finished classics and pushed them back in the other direction.
Back to the sketch
The artist's Flat Out exhibition at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles turns real cars into objects that look like black-and-white comic-book drawings. A group of classic vehicles has been hand-painted white, then overlaid with bold black linework to flatten their shape in the viewer's eye.
The effect is deliberately strange.
From the right angle, the cars look less like museum exhibits and more like full-size illustrations that have escaped the page.
The cars are joined by a mock garage given the same treatment, so the display surrounds the vehicles with a matching two-dimensional world. That setting makes the illusion feel complete, not just applied to a few isolated cars.
Real cars, flat lines
The line-up includes old Mercedes, Porsche and Ferrari models.
The Ferrari 308 GTS is one of the more striking cars, with black lines flowing over the redrawn bodywork. The treatment covers more than body panels too, extending across lights, grilles, bumpers and air intakes.
Vides calls the approach "Reality to Idea", and his past work spans Formula 1, BMW, Fendi and the NBA.
The point is not to make the cars more realistic, but to make the viewer notice how much of a car's identity can survive when colour, texture and depth are stripped back to a sketch-like outline.
The joy is in the double-take: familiar machines rendered like the sketch that came before the finished car. It is simple, clever and immediately legible, which is exactly why it works.
