Two-Tone

1954-56 Dodge C-Series

Posted by The Professor

This is one of the few cars that have fooled me into taking pictures of them twice; the last picture is what it looked like when I first spotted it, and the top several are from a few years later. It does look better now, if a bit less authentic.

Mar Vista, Los Angeles, CA

Photographed November 2011 & December 2016

1961 Ford Ranchero

Posted by The Professor

One of the most tragic byproducts of the evolution in car design has been the elimination of two-tone paintwork from the automotive color palette. Not that this Ranchero is the poster child of two-tone application: cream and light brown render perhaps too much of a resemblance to an oversized vanilla fudge sundae, but still: a massive improvement over a hypothetical solely-cream-colored Ranchero, which would just look like a slab of vanilla popsicle.

Just as two flavors are always better than one; so too are two car colors. Also, California should totally bring black the blue plates from the ’70s and early ’80s like this Ranchero has: they’re much more visually interesting than the drab blue-lettering-on-white-background plate that they haven’t changed since about 1993.

Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA

Photographed August 2017