This week’s entry, roots, brings to mind the history and heritage captured in the song, Strange Fruit. Pictured in surgical scrubs from left to right are Kenn Bivins, Saul Williams, and Cornel West who have made significant gains in cutting the noose of negativity that is unfortunately rooted in African American history.

Actually, Kenn Bivins has done nothing for African American history but draw funny pictures but the two men to his left are people he greatly admires. See the full color version of this rendering at kennbivins.com.

A cactus dude looking at an empty reflection of himself in a handheld mirror. That’s deep, huh? I pulled this old illustration from one of my sketchbooks and decided to color it and post it for the theme of the the week.

This is a still from an animated project that I never fininshed due to workload. I will eventually finish it but until then, glory in part one of my reflection entry.

I love the old proverb, “The barn has burnt down. Now I can see the moon” by Masahide. It speaks of seeing the beautiful things past tragedy and this piece was inspired by that nugget of wisdom.

I thought I might give my adoring fans and brooding competition a peek into one of the many process I use in creating an illustration. In this example I show how I created the Illustration Friday theme of Empty in less than two hours.

1. The sketched idea is the heart of it all. In this step, the layout is the focus and not how good the artwork is.

2. After I am satisfied with the basic layout, I proceed to redrawing the piece to work out any problems with anatomy. This is often my final drawing stage so I spend a lot of time here. I try not to redraw too many times because my line will become tight and mechanical and lose the energy of the original sketch.

3. Here I scan in my illustration and begin laying down basic color in Photoshop.

4. This piece needed texture to appear more believable so I photographed some granite and made a pattern of it to overlay my color.

5. The final stage is where additional shadows and highlights are applied. There was no background to this illustration so I put a basic gradient there to make the statue come forward a bit more.

As I said, I work in a variety of ways but the aforementioned steps worked well for this piece as it made it possible for me to complete it from concept to completion in less than two hours.

Religion seperate of relationship is…empty. No, this is not some attack or commentary on Catholicism. The illustrated statue simply personifies religion. Any questions?

Excerpt from one of my current children’s books projects.

Welcome to the official blog by, of, and about all things related to Kenn Bivins (that’s me). sketchblog is a forum for commentary and discussion about my work-in-progess, musings, and random kenn-etics. Periodic contributors will also include Hebron Norman and Stella Black.