Elston's work has been widely collected in the United States and in Europe, and is included in many public, private and corporate collections. The Northwest Figurative Artists' Alliance was revived in 2010, primarily as a website that featured members' works and show announcements. At its peak the organization had over 60 members. Elston was an original founding member of the Northwest Figurative Artists' Alliance, an organization that presented lectures and symposia on issues related to figurative art and Realism, sponsored ongoing roundtable discussions and periodic meetings amongst artists, published a bi-monthly journal of art criticism and review, networked with figurative artists worldwide and actively worked to promote the concerns of Realism and figuration. He continues to teach ongoing plein air classes and workshops in Seattle and surrounding areas. Elston has taught at Fort Wright College, The Spokane Art School, The Academy for Realist Art (now The Gage Academy), the Frye Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, and has been a guest lecturer at Marymount Manhattan College in New York, Whitworth College in Spokane, Eastern Washington University in Cheney, the University of Washington in Seattle, and The Gage Academy. During those same years he developed a deep and abiding interest in the history of art, and especially in the social history of painting. He continued painting landscape en plein air during his college years, and has made depicting the rural and urban landscape his principal area of interest. His first experiences with landscape painting and drawing were on a trip to Vancouver BC, Victoria BC and Seattle while he was still in high school. He spent a year teaching painting workshops at The Evergreen State College, and then spent several years studying privately in New York and Boston. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Fort Wright in 1975.

He returned to the Pacific Northwest and studied painting at Fort Wright College of the Holy Names in Spokane, and at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. After leaving home at age 16 he traveled extensively, to San Francisco during the peak of the hippy era, then to Los Angeles, New York and Montreal, Quebec, where he finished high school studies at Baron Byng High School. He attended high school in Spokane at the then newly built Joel E. He grew up in the rural area southeast of Spokane Washington called Glenrose Prairie. Elston was born on Jin Spirit Lake Idaho.

New paintboard program for yoworld