Joshua Elek

Watercolor Paintings

Category: Year 1

  • Plein Air “Sketchbook”

    Plein Air “Sketchbook”

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    Watercolor sketchbooks are really expensive. So, I bought a square of full-grain leather, and a leather sewing awl. I cut off part of the leather square, and cut it in half, then I sewed each half onto the square. To get the threads nicely spaced, I used a drafting compass to punch a hole, and…

  • Beaver Creek: #1

    Beaver Creek: #1

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    This past weekend, Rachel took the girls to Pennsylvania to see their cousins, and I got a weekend to myself. Alone time is medicine to me. I decided to take advantage of the alone time, and tossed my easel, my inflateable kayak, a tent, a fishing pole, a blanket, a pillow, some left overs, and…

  • City Rach: #1

    City Rach: #1

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    So… on to the first attempt at a final draft. Here’s the recipe I had in my head at the beginning: Mask figure highlights Paint sky in a light, flat wash. Paint the window frame. Warm with a drop of cool in the upper left corners. Paint the wall cool up top, cool down the…

  • City Rach: Compositions

    City Rach: Compositions

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    I decided to attempt a few different compositions, one left, one right, one dead center, and one with an exaggerated perspective. Each one of these is as simple as I could make it, just a few flat washes. This helped me practice flat washes, and helped plan out the order I’ll need to use to…

  • City Rach: Deepart.io & Exercises

    City Rach: Deepart.io & Exercises

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    I messed with the photo of Rachel in the window in Photoshop a little bit until I came up with this modification of the composition that I think I like best. I won’t print this and paint it, I just wanted to get a quick look at how reordering, stretching, etc might improve the photo’s…

  • City Rach: Value Studies

    City Rach: Value Studies

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    I took this photo of my wife a few months ago when we were in Pittsburgh to watch a live show of My Favorite Murder. It was a rare weekend away for us without kids, and it was very needed. I met Rachel when she lived in Pittsburgh, and as much as I give her…

  • Appalachian Sky: #2

    Appalachian Sky: #2

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    This is my second attempt at painting a view of the valley in the Appalachian mountains from our vacation in Elk Banner, South Carolina. In this version, I expanded the field of view considerably, and it no longer matches the field of view that I have in my mind. In my mind, looking at the…

  • Fundamentals of Composition: Rule of Thirds

    Fundamentals of Composition: Rule of Thirds

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    Easily the most challenging thing for me is composition. I have to hunt and peck, twist my shoulders and cross my eyes in order to find a composition that’s interesting and occasionally beautiful. I look out at the world around me and see beautiful subjects, unique subjects, intriguing stories, but capturing that in a photo,…

  • Appalachian Sky

    Appalachian Sky

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    I wanted to capture the feel of standing on the balcony and looking out over the mountains in Banner Elk, North Carolina over our Fourth of July vacation. Composition At first, I painted the scene from our balcony and tried to frame the valley with the trees in the foreground. I tried to “zoom in”…

  • Shade Tree: #1-3

    Shade Tree: #1-3

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    I took a picture of this tree in the park today. I liked the way the light filtered through the leaves, and how the trunk gradually shifted from a sandy brown to near black. I tried to paint it. Though the paintings were awful, I wanted to post them anyway – because this blog is…

  • Back Porch: #4

    Back Porch: #4

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    I’m a glutton for punishment. I was curious to see what this painting would look like if I used packing tape as a frisket to paint the shadows and chair. So I repainted this chair on my back porch. To start, I sketched the drawing, again being careful to measure perspective. I wanted a lot…

  • Back Porch: #1-3

    Back Porch: #1-3

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    Joseph Zbukvic is my favorite watercolor artist right now. (I know – how original.) Because I admire his work so much, I watch a lot of videos of him painting whenever I find one on YouTube. I have heard him say a handful of times, “There are no bad subjects, only bad paintings.” I also…

  • Camping Castles: #1

    Camping Castles: #1

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    My friend Branden took a picture of Tyler and I playing Castles of Burgundy on the last day of our camping trip. I liked the photo quite a bit, and decided to paint it. First, I cropped the photo, and edited it to strengthen some of the shadows and contrast, and then made it black…

  • Cows on a Hill: #1

    Cows on a Hill: #1

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    I really liked the sky I painted last night, so today I wanted to paint something with a big wide open sky. I have also been enamored with Joseph Zbukvic’s cows, so I wanted to try that as well. To start, I used C4b to wet the paper. Then an F3w of UM Blue and…

  • The Ravine: #9

    The Ravine: #9

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    Oh boy… I went for it and painted a full sheet. I have never painted something this big before, so I was a little curious to see how it would go. It turned out that I really, really enjoyed painting this large size. It’s Father’s day today, so I wanted to paint my family. I…

  • The Ravine: #8

    The Ravine: #8

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    I really tried on this one. This is painted on the back of another painting, so I knew starting out that it was just going to be an exercise, but I really wanted to treat it like a keeper. I think I have a good recipe now for the final painting, which I’ll try on…

  • The Ravine: #7

    The Ravine: #7

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    I’m trying again to capture the memory of visiting the Ravine as a kid. There is something playful here which feels right. And I like that the tree back there is a defined focal point. One of the things I have struggled with is defining a focal point. As far as composition goes, this is…

  • Harmony: #1

    Harmony: #1

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    I wanted to paint something tonight that ushered a different emotion. So many of my paintings are landscapes at the golden hour, and they feel trite because they are often exercises or nostalgic memories. But memories go two ways. I have hurts and darkness in life, and it’s less than authentic for me to ignore…

  • Lowery Two Color Exercise #1

    Lowery Two Color Exercise #1

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    A while ago, I bought Arnold Lowery’s book Start to Paint with Watercolors. I read through the first forty-odd pages and tried to recreate some of what he talks about in those pages as simple drills a while ago, but didn’t take on the first painting exercise until tonight. My first reaction is that this…

  • Church: #1

    Church: #1

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    Every year for the past eleven or twelve years, some of my closest friends and I have gone on a camping trip for a long weekend. At first, there were a lot of us, and gradually life got in the way for a whole lot of us, but Babs, Sean, Branden and I still keep…