Joshua Elek

Watercolor Paintings

Category: Portrait

  • CMA Bust

    CMA Bust

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    A few weeks ago, I went to the Cleveland Museum of Art with my sketchbook, and some pencils. I sat down on a bench looking at a bust, and spent five hours trying to draw it. This was an incredibly valuable exercise – it’s something I definitely want to try again. It highlighted two really…

  • Sketching Practice: Faces and Gesture

    Sketching Practice: Faces and Gesture

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    I haven’t painted anything since my last Farm Road painting, but I haven’t been idle. I have been working on my draftsmanship by trying to draw my way through the Portrait and Figure Drawing courses on Proko.com. I purchased the Portrait course a long time ago, and won the Figure drawing course in the Proko…

  • Bargue Plate: Homer

    Bargue Plate: Homer

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    It’s been a while! I haven’t posted recently because I got Covid, and I’ve been playing catch up ever since. If you are curious, read on. Skip ahead if you don’t care about Covid. TL/DR; Covid is real, and really dangerous for some people – but I’m fine and I never got terribly sick. My…

  • Crappie Weather: #1

    Crappie Weather: #1

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    I have been wanting to get out and go fishing for quite a long time, and this past weekend, I finally did. The ice has thawed, and they are letting Nimisilla fill with the ice melt. So, on Saturday, I dropped my kayak from the ceiling, loaded it on the car, and drove to the…

  • Self Portrait: #Something

    Self Portrait: #Something

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    This looks like a painting I would laugh at if I came across it in Magic: The Gathering. (Which I have never played, but want to.) The artist who painted this was clearly trying really hard, and clearly didn’t know where to start or what to omit, and as a result we have a sloppy…

  • TRuth Bader Ginsburg RIP

    TRuth Bader Ginsburg RIP

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    I was deeply saddened to hear that Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away recently. My whole family celebrates RBG, we regularly play “I Dissent” an RBG-themed board game. We have a children’s book biography of her life that we have read several times. My youngest daughter even went as RBG for Halloween. I am deeply grateful…

  • Self Portrait: #2

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    I spent sine time working on sketching the self portrait photo to learn more about my own face. So… yeah. That’s about how that went. Halfway through drawing, I decided that I had the perspective wrong. Rather than start over, apparently I just decided to change angles, and now my face is all deformed. This…

  • Self Portrait: #1

    Self Portrait: #1

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    I love the work of Eudes Correia. Check him out if you don’t know about him. The way he manages to capture expression and sincerity in his subjects is just mesmerizing. His portraits are punchy and full of gesture, but even with all the busy colors and expressive brush work, he never seems to take…

  • Self Portrait Charcoal: #1

    Self Portrait Charcoal: #1

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    I took two weeks off of painting. During that time, I dedicated time to learning a little bit about drawing. I have no desire to specialize in figure drawing, but I do think I can learn a lot about painting by learning how to draw. There are a few things I learned are important, which…

  • So it Goes: #1

    So it Goes: #1

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    Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the Tralfamadorians a lot. They are an alien race in his books, and one thing that always interested me about them is that they live freely in time. They compare the human experience to being on a train car in an iron suit that’s bolted in place, with a helmet that…

  • Fart Around: #4

    Fart Around: #4

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    I wanted to create a version for myself, since Kurt Vonnegut is one of my heroes. Unfortunately, I decided to remove the white vignetting on the painting by simply extending his shoulders and jacket. As a result, it looks like he is wearing a circus tent. Ugh. My options for fixing it are to paint…

  • Fart Around: #3

    Fart Around: #3

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    I am really pretty happy with this one.  I started by spending a lot of time on the sketch (3 hours or so). I printed it off, and tried to measure using my pencil as if I had a live model. I got a lot of the lines right, but some were WAYYYY off. (Hishands…

  • Weir: #3

    Weir: #3

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    My friend is a big Grateful Dead fan, and when he saw the painting of Len, he asked if it was Bob Weir. He then posted a picture of Bob Weir, and I decided to paint a portrait of Bob for him. I did an initial value study, and a first-draft (in which the eyes…