Audra's Inner Sanctum

Goodbye Blogger

2009-06-23T18:23:00.000-07:00

Hello, my one reader! I'm sorry I was not true to my word. Let me redirect you to www.audraesch.com where I have my new blog. There you will find my latest and greatest posts and hopefully a lot of great drawing tutorials. Thanks for stopping by!

No More Slacking!

2009-03-30T21:26:00.000-07:00

I am a slacker! When it comes to blogging that is, but not when it comes to painting. Now, I realize that I am basically posting this for myself except for the occasional random internet surfer who happens upon my blog since none of my friends really truly read my blog. I would blame my lack of blogging for this but I don't think anyone read it even when I did blog except perhaps Chav, but it looks as though he has not blogged in quite a while either. Nevertheless! I do care about that random internet surfer because my new motto is "Create and Deliver Value"! So my blog is one way to deliver. Other ways I am delivering is my website, Facebook, and Deviantart. Deviantart is probably my better bet, but on that site I need to spend more time looking at other people's art and leaving comments which takes diligence and time. One problem though is that I delay doing this because I use the excuse that I want to wait until I get a good many more pieces uploaded before I start chatting up the Deviants but that's just a staller. Really, it is because I am a big chicken. I am afraid people will think my stuff is crap. I know it's not crap but I want it to be up there with the best. I know it's not there now though I have improved immensely since the last time I wrote. I should not be concerned. I must do the best I can, creating and delivering! For this post I will post my latest watercolor and my latest oil and will try to catch up once a week. Actually no! I will commit to posting once a week!

I'm Not a Slacker

2008-04-16T22:07:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been two whole months since I last blogged! I didn't realize that it had been sooo long. I want to personally apologize to my friend Chav because I know he checks my blog religiously. Well, I will spare everyone and only give a brief excuse: I have been busy working and painting. I have a couple of paintings in between this one and the last one but I don't really feel like going back and blogging about them. I should blog at the time of my excitement (not that I wasn't excited about them, I have just moved on and the latest painting is always my favorite). However, you can see the new ones at www.audraesch.com if you're feeling extra spry and want to do a little more clicking, (I promise it will be worth the effort).
On to my latest painting. This one is of my friend Debbie, (yes I made her dress up in a china doll dress, but she looked really good in it). Even though I was planning on painting her on a bigger canvas, I painted it on a 9x12 because it was Sunday evening and I was just itching to paint something and finish it. (I will paint a bigger one though, I think.) I like my stuff better when I'm in that kind of mood because the less controlled brush strokes give it a texture that I normally wouldn't have. Let me know what you think.

More portraits

2008-02-10T17:23:00.000-08:00

Here is my latest. Sorry it's been a while, I've been working my day job. Anyway, the lady is painted from an old black and white photo and the dog is a portrait of Lucy, one of my dad's dogs. Hope you enjoy.

My True Love

2008-01-09T18:00:00.000-08:00

I have found my favorite brush and technique. It's called oil on canvas with a flat brush. After all that digital painting, my soul craved for something tangible. I think this was the most satisfying painting I have done in my life. I started out with a flesh colored canvas already dry and used basically two colors: indigo blue and burnt sienna. It took me 12 hours to paint on a 16x20 canvas. The one unfortunate thing is is that I copied a photo from a 2005 Harper's Bazaar magazine, but I had no time to think, I just had to paint (I did change her skirt to a long skirt to make it feel more period). However, I feel truly inspired to continue in this style of painting. I didn't want it to look like anyone else's work as I have felt in the past, I simply enjoyed painting however it decided to come out. Now I want to do a whole series of paintings like this so I am going to con my friends into dressing up in period clothing. Hey, if anyone reads this and would like to volunteer, by all means send me a note.

Being critical

2008-01-06T23:47:00.000-08:00

This is what I've been working on this weekend. I'm applying the techniques I used in the last portrait study and I like it so far but I still have a problem comparing my style to others and liking theirs better. Some of my favorite comic book artists are Marko Djurdjevic, Jo Chen and Alex Ross of course. The first two seem to have more texture whereas everything I do tends to be smooth which is a little bit more like Alex Ross. However, Alex does his with gouache which I think takes greater skill than my digital work. I guess the way I'm doing it now lends itself to that look. Anyway, I'm hoping I can get to the same skill level as the professionals which is where I need to be to get the work I want. (I try to aim high :))

Another portrait study

2008-01-04T21:12:00.000-08:00

I'm on a quest to find my favorite brush and techniques in Photoshop. I've been obsessed lately and even dream about brush strokes and study them whenever I see a painting I like. Here is another that I did today. I started out with the soft round brush again and laid in the basic shadows and contours of the face, then went over with some sort of sponge brush (it's in the middle of the brush selection). I like how this turned out. I chose the original photograph because of the lighting and the hairstyle. I think she's a little more attractive now if I do say so myself.

Pet Portraits and Photoshop Practice

2008-01-03T23:42:00.000-08:00

I have a couple of new things. I painted Cat! for my friend and fellow blogger Holley (Complainr Knits!) in exchange for a knit shrug, she did an awesome job! It will go quite nicely with all the black shirts I have but no jacket to wear with them until now. After painting Cat!, I am going to try now more than ever to get my pet portrait business going. I'm sorry, but if you're not a good friend I only paint for money, so if you or know of someone who has a pet and money, send them to me.
I'm still working on my Photoshop skills so here is the latest (I got bored with fairy princess). I've been trying different brushes and techniques. This one I just used a soft round brush. It isn't quite finished. It's not an accurate copy as I was just concerned about technique (I've included the reference photo.) It took me a few hours this afternoon.

Finished! and on to Disney Fairy Princess type crap

2007-12-11T21:24:00.000-08:00

I have finished the Dragonfly Fairy Witch Woman in a Blue Dress! I have posted it on my deviant art page, so you may view it in it's entirety here: audraw.deviantart.com and buy a print if you like or my website: www.audraesch.com. My current painting I am working on is the one at right. It is very Disney and I'm probably wasting my time with it but it's a lot of fun.

Dragonfly Fairy Witch Woman in a Blue Dress

2007-11-28T22:24:00.000-08:00

Apparently, you need a lot of descriptors of your art to increase traffic flow to your blog, so I've reposted her (how do you like my piece of Fantasy Art?) and will be using the next couple of sentences to describe her thoroughly. I don't know where the inspiration for this woman came... actually I'm feeling a bit lazy tonight so I'm just going to list words: flowing braids, shiny boobs, Medusa-like hair, glowing dragonfly, silky blue dress, magic powers, intense gaze, nature goddess... well I'm tired of this game. I guess if anyone thinks of any more please feel free to tell me (because now I expect more than one person to view my blog).

Trying harder

2007-11-14T22:54:00.000-08:00

Here's a few more hours of work.

This is sick

2007-10-11T15:48:00.000-07:00

No, it didn't take me two months to do a braid and a boob. I worked on it last night, but once I start on something I get addicted and don't want to do anything else like projects I'm being paid for, but hopefully I will be back sooner than a couple of months. Also, I just thought I would share that someone told me that this painting was "sick". I like that compliment.

Dissecting Irrational Fear: To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before

2007-08-03T22:06:00.001-07:00

I read the other day (more like 10 weeks ago when I got the idea for this blog) that 3-Dimensional printers may be coming to our homes in the next 5 years for the affordable price of 1 to 5 thousand dollars. At first I thought, “wow, pretty cool. I can make my own Barbies”, but shortly thereafter (and before you make the assumption that such silly thoughts are all that go on in my brain (you will have more proof later)), two forces that have long waged war within my mind began to battle again: technology versus nature. I love science fiction but once it starts to become science fact (which history shows is generally inevitable), technophobia overcomes my excitement. My general over-reactive fear is that the world will become like Coruscant, the Star Wars planet that is almost entirely covered with buildings. When this happens, I take a step back and analyze my fear.

First, I realized that 3D printers are strangely suggestive of one of K. Eric Drexler’s machines from his book “Engines of Creation”, which describes a machine that uses nanotechnology to create from the atom up any object one desires including a slab of beef. If this was written in the context of a science fiction, I would be highly entertained. Drexler however, describes it with the hope and conviction that some day it will become a reality. My entertainment is replaced with a morbid fascination of what the world would be like with this kind of machine and the abuses that would come along with it (I shudder to think, but we won’t go there because we are dissecting a more irrational fear at the moment. So for now, I tell myself that this machine is unlikely to be invented in my lifetime.)

Though Drexler's machine would definitely work in a world that has no natural habitat like Coruscant, it is still a long way off from our present “engine of creation” which chiefly involves the making of more plastic objects. This, if you boil it down, represents my main cause for concern here which stems from an article I read a while back: The Feminization of American Culture. What does feminization and plastic have to do with each other? According to Leonard Sax, in a nutshell, plastic contains synthetic estrogens, and in highly industrialized areas there is a direct correlation between the amount of the synthetic estrogen leakage into the water and the androgyny of aquatic males. But more importantly, studies show that men in industrialized areas also have a lower sperm count than those in rural areas. (Read the article, it is quite an interesting theory.) That’s right you nay-sayers, technology could very well be the extinction of man. I shouldn’t fear a world like Coruscant but rather one that is described in “Children of Men”.

But just as I’m about to throw technology to the wind for a life in the country where I pump water, am married to a fertile man, and hang up my laundry in the nude, I realize I would be shunning a key factor that has advanced man’s knowledge of his natural surroundings. The same technology that gives us artificially flavored food, which puts synthetic estrogen in my water, and that causes black dust to settle on my roses, is the same technology that has allowed me to feed my burning desire to know the intricacies and secrets of the universe. For instance, the advancement of technology has allowed the Hadron Collider to be invented which will hopefully give us some clues as to what dark matter really is. A question I’m sure, that is plaguing everyone’s minds. Okay, so I don’t have a burning desire just for knowledge’s sake (I’m trying to write a science fiction story at the moment) but I do find physics fascinating and I read up on it when I have the chance and when I need to do research.

Suffice it to say, this dichotomy will probably never resolve itself logically within my brain. So, rather than fearing a future that is like “Children of Men” or Coruscant, I retreat into a fantasy world like (and this is where I reveal my ultimate geekiness and where perhaps my sanity breaks down) Star Trek: TNG. Why Star Trek? Because that is where the holodeck exists, of course. Obviously, I’m not really expecting nor hoping that the world will end up like Star Trek (I would really worry about me, if you aren’t already), but in order to imagine any kind of paradise in this lifetime, my mind won’t rationally allow one to exist unless I first imagine programming it into my personal holodeck, that way both technology and nature (though “nature” will never really be real in a holodeck (but what’s really real, really? Everything is made of the same stuff and who knows what subatomic “particles” are truly made of anyway?)) can coexist without as many toxic byproducts. And, if you think about it, it is an appropriate evolution. As nature has helped us create technology, technology then recreates nature. (Right, of course, makes perfect sense.)

Keeping myself accountable, hopefully.

2007-07-17T22:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, so the blogs that I intend to write never seem to coincide with the paintings and drawings I've been doing. (I must have some sort of split brain problem.) I also have trouble finishing things because I get bored easily. So, in order to keep myself accountable, I will post my latest project. Here is I guess what you would call a typical Audra picture in terms of subject. But I have found that going digital has allowed me to produce more closely what I actually see in my head, so I've been having fun and I will continue to post her progress.

I'm a Bum

2007-06-21T21:32:00.000-07:00

Soooo, I'm not very good at keeping up this blogging thing because with many things I become a perfectionist. I have a post that I've been working off and on but I'm still not quite satisfied with it and I have no drawings to go with it. So there you have my excuse you one or two readers out there. Here is something to tie you over. It's part of a growing portfolio of clip art that I've become addicted to doing. They are so easy and the quick turn around is immensely satisfying. I hope you enjoy.

Grand Ideas

2007-05-14T18:30:00.000-07:00

I vowed to myself that I would finish today's work before I blogged, but I am so frustrated (you would think there would be a close-up of a New York Pier from the viewpoint of a ship, if anyone has or knows of said picture please help me out!) that I think that it would help to take a break. This post, however, will just be an addendum to my previous post, in that along with my strange little musings, I will have to have an illustration by my own hand to go with it. The rule is I can't post anything unless I have a drawing or a painting inspired by whatever topic I choose to discuss. This, in theory, will force me to hone my skills and build up my portfolio. So, to keep my own rule I have drawn the above to represent thought. I don't think it's very creative but for this little blog, it'll have to do. I have grand ideas for future blogs so I'll save my creativity for them. Hopefully, I'll stick to it.

A place for thoughts that who knows where they came from?

2007-05-11T18:28:00.000-07:00

Like many people have done, I've decided to start a blog to express my thoughts and opinions. However, I believe my motivations for doing so may differ from others. Being a visual artist, I think in pictures (sometimes down to the very quark and graviton (does it really exist?) in your body) which is not always easy for me to translate into words (heh, heh). But I find that if I've written them down, my articulation skills are improved for any later discussion. Therefore, since this is serving the purpose to organize my own personal thoughts (and an excuse to make another cool web page; I probably spent more time on the above graphics then I did writing this), I'm not sure that I care that people read this (well I care a little) but I'm not going to be one of those people who announces my blog to everyone every time I've written something new. Those who do that irritate me and causes me not to read their blog at all. In which case, I hope they are the ones reading this (sorry, a little bit of my passive aggressive tendencies coming out). Anyway, I would also like to use this time to ponder the strange, the interesting, the provoking... For example: if you're sending Styrofoam, what do you pack it in? Just kidding. Hopefully my posts will be a little more intelligent than that. Anyway, it will be those things that I muse about or have read about that I find intriguing but never really discuss in depth with anyone, (well frankly because they're probably a little too out there and I usually forget about them the next day). So thanks for stopping by.