Innovative automotive styling once started from sketches. “American Dreaming: Car Style Detroit,” an exhibit running through Feb. 13 at Detroit’s Scarab Club, showcases more than 50 drawings of mid-20th-century cars. Back then, car companies hired artists to come up with exciting new concepts. Not many of the sketches remain; car makers destroyed the ones that weren’t used for the final products, so the surviving examples of nonexistent models were likely smuggled out. One artist rolled them up and stored them in the hollow ends of his crutches. Another threw them out the window, then collected them when he left. “We estimate only 5% of the work created was saved,” says curator Robert Edwards.