dollyrogerflag | (no subject)

I'm sure most of y'all heard the news-- Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball, has recently passed away during the year of the dragon. His art style for game art is one of the reasons why I got into Jrpgs-- I liked how he's not afraid to draw cute characters and give them cartoon-like features. I also noticed that he oftehn wrote characters that grows, gets married and have kids-- and their story would just continue and their kids would become the main characters of the medium! I could be over-analyzing this, but seeing how he drew cute babies doing natural baby things and watching them grown overtime, I truly believed Toriyama embraced his parenthood.

Because I grew up watching the censored version of Dragon Ball on WB, I ended up rewatching it over the first two years of the pandemic. It was a completely different experience and its even better watching the series in its original form with proper context. So I love the series even more as an adult. Just looking at this art inspires me to illustrate objects in a different way. He's the master of drawing cute, roundish vehicles-- and I'm still doing my best to study his style because I love his take on vehicles.

I'm sure he have made some drawing/writing choices that were questionable...I don't perceive him to be a holy saint in any way, but I've connected with most of my friends from middle/high school because of Dragon Ball. I remembered gifting them print outs of Trunks and Vegeta to decorate on their binders. Even in my adult work life, I've bonded with co-workers who are Dragon Ball fans. I even got relatives who've watched a lot of wuxia series, and we would gather around the television to watch DB.

Here's my fan art for Dragon Ball...its a WIP.

RIP Mr. Toriyama. Thanks for inspiring me to think outside the box when it comes to illustrations.