Manholes to Murals - Ellie Bogardus Wall Landscape Cover

Reconstructed wall mural

I spent about eight hours today tracing characters from the manhole covers that appeared similar to the sketches made of the wall mural on the south facing exterior wall of Ellie Bogardus' house on Nottingham Drive in Cambria, California. Then using the sketch made in 1985, an interpretation of the wall mural was created. The landscape was reconstructed from the faux-titled painting, Oakhurst Renaissance Fair / Dana's Favorite. A lot of liberty was taken with the vegetation - only the tree trucks were shown in the original sketch.

Manhole #1

This photograph is the manhole cover and skirt just north of the two-house complex that was occupied by Ellie Borgardus and her mother. This is the most-north manhole that has sketches made by Bogardus into the concrete skirts. This and the next photograph were taken during Spring Break in 2006.

Manhole #2

Here is the second manhole, the one closest to the original Borgardus house. In the background is the new house being constructed over the footprint of the house that Ellie lived in. A third manhole is found south of this one, that also has sketches in the skirt. I didn't take photographs of those images - the quality of the sketches have degraded because of traffic wear.

Manhole skirt and other characters

The figures to the left are tracings done from the manhole cover skirts on Nottingham Drive in front of the former two-house complex that was owned by Ellie Bogardus. All of the tracings were made by pasting the photo images of the skirts into PowerPoint and then using the Drawing menu Curve Tool and sketching around the character images (all except figures d and e). Figures d and e were interpretations of the 1985 sketch book renditions of the artist's house exterior wall mural. Below is the key to where the images can be found.
a. Manhole #1
b. Manhole #1
c. Manhole #1
d. South facing wall, from sketch
e. South facing wall, from sketch
f. Manhole #2
g. Manhole #1
h. Manhole #1