I’ve been invited to Eckley Miners’ Village 2024 Patchtown Days to give a book talk. Eckley is a preserved 19th century coal town in northeastern Pennsylvania where some of my mother’s family is from.

I’m looking forward to it because I love Eckley, enough to write books about its history and earliest residents in my books “Coal Country Connections” and “You Dream Every Night That I am Home“:

As I was looking through some of my photos of Eckley recently, I wanted to do more to express my sense of connectedness to it. I decided to try to draw or paint some scenes of Eckley.

However, as you can see in my previous posts, I haven’t created a finished piece of art in a while–I’ve gotten into the sketchbook craze like a lot of artists I follow online. I’ve also been uncertain as to what medium I’m most comfortable with–colored pencils? Watercolor? Acrylics?

But I forged ahead with my Eckley idea anyway. I decided on watercolors, and after a couple of frustrating days at it decided that I needed some instruction. I went online to what I call the University of YouTube and found videos by an artist I’ve blogged about before–Shelley Prior. I love watching her videos–she remarked in one of them that she’s been told more than once that she reminds people of Bob Ross, and I can see what they mean. She’s friendly, low-key, and incredibly generous in explaining how she does what she does. And most importantly she’s so good that she makes it look easy.

I realized that I was going to be painting a lot of buildings, so I looked around YouTube for watercolor artists who specialize in this area. I found Susan Monroe, who paints watercolors of houses. Her videos were incredibly helpful as well.

I watched Shelley’s, Susan’s, and other artists’ videos every spare moment I had, taking notes and screenshots along the way. I realized that I had to pull my own paintbrushes out at some point, but I resisted for a while, telling myself I needed more instruction. However, after giving myself a mental kick in the pants, I finally sat down and pulled out my watercolors. The idea of trying to create a finished painting was incredibly intimidating.

Instead of trying to finish whole paintings, I decided to start by practicing only parts like weathered wood, sky, grass, and foliage. This ended up being incredibly useful when it came to painting entire scenes later. Below are examples of my practice with notes to myself:

I finally got up the nerve to try copying some of my photos of Eckley and ended up painting five of them.

Below are my photo and watercolor of the coal breaker at Eckley.

Obviously, I took a lot of artistic license here. The photo was taken at midday, and the shadows were too dark in my opinion. So, I lightened things up. And once I got out my so-called artistic license, I changed other things as well. How about some clouds in the sky? And let’s make this field of grass greener. The trees, too, while we’re at it.

I used other photos, some I took and some I found online, to complete the breaker. It’s not so intact at the base anymore, but I decided to paint it this way anyway, in honor of what it once was. I left the tumbledown condition at the top seen in my photo, however. The breaker, built as a prop for the movie “The Molly Maguires” in the late 1960s, is the only coal breaker left in northeastern Pennsylvania and is slowly falling in on itself.

You may have heard of the quote about writing books–“write what you know.” When it comes to art, for me anyway, the saying would be “paint what you’re passionate about”.