Next two days

Continuing with the documentation of Van Nuys...

Yesterday's prompt was "It's the home of..." i.e., what is it known for? Well...in certain parts, gangs...hmmm. I did a little more historical research, and came up with this composite painting:

Before the San Fernando Valley was the home of endless suburbs, it was an important source of produce, and two of its most frequently grown crops were walnuts and oranges. If you own one of those suburban houses that was built before a certain year, like I do (mine was built in 1949), you probably have an ancient leftover orange tree in your back yard from those endless groves. Mine is barely hanging on at this point—after all, it's more than 70 years old!—but despite the fact that it's about a third the size it used to be, it still bears about a dozen perfectly delicious juicy oranges every January.

Besides the suburbs, represented here by a partial view of my own bungalow, Van Nuys citizens used to most of them work at the General Motors plant, but that closed down in 1992, changing the economy of the region significantly.

Van Nuys is the home of one of the busiest general aviation airports in the world, with more than 230,000 takeoffs and landings every year. The movie Casablanca was filmed there, and it's also where Norma Jean Dougherty, a worker on the drone assembly line, was discovered and morphed into Marilyn Monroe. It was built in 1928, and is still going strong today.

And of course we must mention the climate, which is predominantly sunny, and graced by the stately yet ridiculous silhouettes of palm trees along many of its boulevards.

Today's prompt was "Main Street, high street, downtown, crossroads." With Van Nuys being the seat of government for the region, and all of that being located on Van Nuys Blvd., that street would seem to qualify today, although the first street actually designed and built for the city was Sherman Way! I drew a bit of the government section of the street (badly), and up front I featured a longstanding tradition of Van Nuys Boulevard: Cruising, as memorialized by the movie American Graffiti. Show off your cherry car, pick up a date, hang out with your buddies on a warm summer night...as you can see from the posted sign, the local constabulary doesn't view that activity so benignly.

Art in the time of self-quarantine!

I somehow haven't managed to make much art lately, although I have been thinking a lot about a couple of projects, and have made some preliminary sketches for one in particular. But a Facebook friend decided to start a new page called Art in the Time of Self Quarantine, and then posted a "prompts" list that is all about where we are—home town, where it is, who lives there, what you can find there, etc. And despite the fact that I, unlike the author of the page, don't live somewhere quaint and eminently paintable (she lives on Whidbey Island in Washington), I decided to participate.

My first painting reflects the split personality of the town where I live. My house is part of the area known as Van Nuys, but a few years back a small section of Van Nuys petitioned to set itself off as a separate entity called Lake Balboa. We are the far west chunk of Van Nuys, right on the borders of Reseda and Encino, and we boast part of the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area as our own (though it mostly lives in Encino), including the artificial Lake Balboa that offers bike and walking paths, picnic areas, boating (swan peddle boats), and (in the spring) beautiful cherry trees, along with lots of wildlife (mostly birds). Thus the name.

So, rather than paint a picture of the "Welcome to Van Nuys" sign, which is on Van Nuys Blvd. in a commercial district, I chose instead to paint the Welcome to Lake Balboa sign at the entrance to the park and actual lake.

Although I don't really have anything else going on right now while in quarantine, for some reason I was feeling impatient and not particularly inspired, so I rushed this and as a result did a bad job on the sign lettering (which was the whole point of the picture!). But I'm letting it stand because I don't want to do it over! I did like the people and the dog.

Today, I was feeling much more inspired, and I wanted to do something more than just a map of Van Nuys, so I looked it up on Google and found a Wikipedia article all about the man for whom the town is named, Isaac Newton Van Nuys. He was quite the busy guy during his lifetime—I have included just some of his history by incorporating it into my artwork. This was fun, as I got to combine drafting, portraiture, and ornamentation.

There are also prompts available from the Urban Sketching groups; when I get completely bored of my surroundings, I'm going to go out and fulfill some of them from the isolation of my car!

These are both in my Bee Sketchbook (9x12), incorporating Uniball pens, pencil, and watercolor. #artinthetimeofselfquarantine #melliott #vannuys

Another aspect

I tried another one of "Tildy," from another photo representing a completely different mood. No smiles this time, but instead a rather quizzical, almost anxious look. And again, I feel like I didn't quite catch it. I got the love in the eyes, but not the curious cocked-head, eyebrows-up expression of the photo. And without that, I'm not sure the portrait is a good one.

There is always an indefinable something you have to capture to make the portrait individual to that person or animal, and I'm beginning to grasp how to get that with people, but not quite yet with the animals. Also, these smooth-haired, mostly white dogs are hard to paint! Gimme a hairy mop of a dog and I can work it over with a pen and some expressive line and get the gist, but this gal was a much bigger challenge.

This is Mathilda #2
Pencil and watercolor on Fluid 140-lb. watercolor paper


An addendum to this post: Susan liked and is taking both of them.

Likenesses

Capturing a likeness is such a tricky thing. In this past six weeks of drawing and painting portraits, I think I have gotten better at it; at least I have improved on the placement of features so that people don't end up with either moon or horse faces! But capturing the likeness of an animal is even trickier—especially if you start out knowing that this is a beloved pet and someone is going to be judging your effort minutely for resemblance.

I'm painting an "in memoriam" portrait for a friend of a friend. My friend sent me several good reference photos, and one in particular that looked like it was doable, but then she said that the preference was for one of the other, "smiling" pictures, because that's how this dog will be best remembered. So, I gave it a shot.

I may be doing more versions of this one, perhaps trying the one from a different angle. This one feels a little more gape-y than smile-y. And the all-grass-everywhere background isn't pleasing me so much, now that it's done. But this was great practice, and I'm sure I'll be able to pull it off eventually.

This is "Mathilda, #1."
Pencil, watercolors, on Fluid watercolor block (140 lb.)
7.5x9.25"

Background for context

Although I didn't do too well with this background (because I was impatient and therefore not precise), I wanted to put it in as part of this portrait of Triste, because sometimes surroundings tell just as much about a person as a depiction of their face.

My friend Triste is in many ways a typical New York chick—that is to say, abrupt, caustic, funny with a bit of an edge, an embracer of left-wing politics and emphatic values and opinions. But she also has this softer side that wouldn't seem to "go" with her personality: she's an amazing baker, has made a garden almost worthy of the secret one in Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic, and creates a simple but classic and beautiful background for her life in her 100-year-old farmhouse in Pennsylvania with her husband and two dogs.

I think I caught her likeness pretty well, apart from going a bit too orange with her colors. This was fun to paint—it made me remember the good times we had when she was a Californian. I hope we see each other again sometime soon.

"Triste"
Pencil and watercolor
9x9" Bee multi-media sketchbook

With the Beat

March 24th will be the 101st birthday of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, best know for his first collection, A Coney Island of the Mind. He was the co-founder of San Francisco's iconic City Lights Booksellers and Publishers in 1953, and published many of the Beat poets (although he did not consider himself one of them). He was arrested in 1957 for publishing Allen Ginsburg's Howl.

Upon his 100th birthday last year, the City of San Francisco proclaimed his birthday "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day," in the tradition of the celebration of Bloomsday in Dublin for poet James Joyce's Ulysses.

I was recently approached to make a rather grand project for this year's celebration, and although I didn't feel I could take it on, I did agree that I would do various pieces of artwork to take note of the day. Since my mind has been on portraits this past six weeks, the first thing I undertook was a portrait of Ferlinghetti, based on a photograph (photographer unknown) that I found online. I believe it was taken within the past couple of years, so I hope it is still a fairly accurate depiction. He looks to be an amiable fellow! #Ferlinghetti101

"Lawrence Ferlinghetti"
Pencil and watercolor
9x9 inches, Bee sketchbook

Lesson fail

I have been looking forward to painting this guy for weeks—partly, I must admit, because his was the last picture of the 30 days of Sktchy portraits, but mostly because he has such an interesting face, expression, hair. So why I didn't follow the lesson is beyond me, except that I always feel the need to do something a little differently. Most times that works out, but sometimes it just implodes, as it did today.

The lesson, ironically, was to know when to stop when making a portrait. The instructor decided to focus on the face—the eyes in particular, and his general expression of slight anxiety—and then left everything else—the dreads, the facial hair—to simple squiggly pen lines, so that the face would really pop.

I decided I didn't want to be a copycat, so instead of working in ink, I drew him in pencil and decided to paint the whole thing—and boy did I. My biggest mistake, which I realized way too late, was introducing a stark black for the pupils of the eyes and for the whiskers. After doing everything else in shades of Sienna, Shadow Violet, Naples Yellow, and Ultramarine, I should have stuck with that soft palette. The black just overwhelmed everything, and stuck out like a sore thumb.

Once I realized that, I decided I couldn't paint the dreads black as well, so I did them in Shadow Violet. Nope. They weren't strong enough to fight with the black or to stand out against the face. I changed half of them over to Sienna. Nope again. Another bad choice.

At that point, I decided to stop. I started writing this, and let the paint dry. Then I thought, What have I got to lose? So I took my pen and went back in with a squiggly line on the dreads and the whiskers and put a few lines here and there to accentuate parts of the face a little more.

The black line everywhere at least cancelled out the problem with the contrast between the soft colors and the stark black, but the entire portrait is still woefully overworked. I'm posting it anyway, as a lesson to myself to be more discriminating and to think a few steps ahead. I'm going to try him again in a few days when I'm not feeling so frustrated with this version. I still think it will be a cool painting, if I can get it right.

This is Jujitsu master Ras.

#30faces30days
Sktchy portraits—"Ras"
Pencil and watercolor in Bee sketchbook