The car stays put

What it is

A studio for one vehicle at a time. The owner sends one photograph of a car, motorcycle, truck, tractor or camper van, and the engine paints it into one of twelve stages in four legs: racing posters in the line of Geo Ham and Roger Soubie; Deco salon lithographs and pochoir plates from the years of the Gazette du Bon Ton; the coachbuilder’s catalogue in gouache and airbrush on illustration board; thick oil, watercolour and a Dutch still life; and the chrome, neon and metalflake of the American roadside.

Every one of those traditions painted the machine accurately and invented everything around it, so the engine is told to do the same. The make, the model, the body lines, the wheels, the stance and the colour stay as photographed; the light, the place and the century are painted. The one you keep is printed on paper, canvas or a garment, up to 40 × 60″.

What it refuses

Legible number plates: they render blank, because a plate is an address and a print hangs where strangers walk past. People: no driver, no rider, no crowd, so the vehicle is the portrait. Manufacturers’ wordmarks set as text, and makers’ or races’ names on the type desk: a badge keeps its shape and its place, and the letters belong to the companies that own them. Weapons, and crashes or damage painted as spectacle. And any photograph that is not a vehicle, which is turned away before the engine sees it.

Who runs it

PaintedApp, LLC, the company behind every Painted studio. One mailbox answers: support@painted.app. Post goes to PaintedApp, LLC, 1327 SE Tacoma St #394, Portland, OR 97202. The questions page has the short answers, and the legal page has the rest.