Drawing by Lise Petrauskas, via Flickr creative commons

We usually post photos in our daily “art of transit.” But I’m more than happy to post drawings and paintings when they’re good and I can find them. This one was done on Adobe Ideas for Illustration.

Even if you can’t draw to save your life, there’s some great software out there to transform photos into drawings and paintings. I used Photoshop Elements to recently make this photo of the Gold Line look more like a drawing. I got even better results using Elements to transform an iPhone photo of Pioneer Basin Lake #1 in the Sierra’s John Muir Wilderness into something that looks like a painting. Try some of the different effects found on the right side of the screen on Elements — I like the “fresco” effect.

Photos can also be heavily altered with Snapseed for iPad — here’s one of the Mesquite Sand Dunes in Death Valley National Park. I like combos of the “vintage,” “drama” and “grunge” effects.

Of course, all of these could be used to swiftly and artfully make your photos of local mass transit look a lot better. And then you can show them off to the entire world right here on The Source.

To submit a photo for the Art of Transit, post it to Metro’s Flickr group, email it to sourcemetro@gmail.com or Tweet it to @metrolosangeles with an #artoftransit hashtag. Many of the photos we’ve featured can be seen in these galleries on Flickr.