For this WP photo challenge on love I’m going to turn to a bit of persistent pop culture. Out on a jog yesterday, I noticed this VW Beetle colored in graffiti,  a form of hand lettering and artwork. This rolling form of artwork is often called an “art car”.

The VW Beetle is an icon that says love in so many ways.  It is laden with old semiotics such as “the summer of love” and “the love bug” and new semiotics such as the art car movement which includes a whole class of VW graffiti. I thought I’d try some water-color to bring out the dreaminess of the allusions. I’m beginning to see that sketchnotes helps my photography both because of what I noticed and what I did with what I noticed:

Then I thought the car would pop more if I made the background recede by desaturating it to black and white so I made a BW version:

While I liked this version I was still interested in my original vision so I layered the color and black and white versions with a mask to get this which looks more like an unfinished painting:

The “summer of love” is oh so long ago and yet this car still manages to stay dear to the hearts of many and for different reasons in each era from the 1960s to 2013. That’s a long-term love.

Related articles

• Friday’s Foto Fun – Grafitti (scottiechronicles.com)
• 3 Tips for Better Black and White Conversion using Lightroom (digital-photography-school.com)
• [Review] The Sketchnote Handbook (Video Edition) (weblog.masukomi.org)
• Sketchnote Neighborhood Font Find (jenniferhartnetthenderson.wordpress.com)
• Weekly Photo Challenge: Love (farawayinthesunshine.wordpress.com)
• Applied Comm. – Semiotic photo & Annotation (kaylieinc.wordpress.com)