My contest entry for the Dragon Ball Forever (deviantART) traditional media contest, "Hunting for the Dragon Balls." I rediscovered my love for pen work while I was on the road with my husband, so it may actually turn out to be a godsend that I wasn't able to use Photoshop. (Yes, once-upon-a-time I was a pencil-and-ink artist, and did mainly pencil drawings like my portrait of Goku and ink drawings like this one.) For this piece, I wanted to avoid a lot of the common traps for the theme - Goten and Trunks, dinosaur chases, etc. For me, the most memorable part of "hunting for the dragon balls" was in the first series, when it truly was an adventure. I've often wondered if Goku and Bulma, once their lives got turned upside down in Dragon Ball Z, ever missed those days when it was primarily the two of them, adventuring together to far-flung places, finding dragon balls in the most unlikely spots. With that in mind, I decided to draw an adult Goku and Bulma high on a mountain top, drawn by the dragon radar to the Four Star dragon ball. (Only one of the stars is visible in the image, however, as most of the ball is nestled in foliage. This was intentional - the theme is "hunting for the dragon balls" not "OMG LOOK THE DRAGON BALL IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE PIC." ^^; ) I didn't want the viewer to try to place this anywhere in the canon timeline, so I've intentionally pulled their outfits and Bulma's hair style from different parts of the canon. It's a speculative, "what if" sort of work - had things been different, would they have adventured together again? Or would it have remained a good memory from their childhood? This was done on manga paper from Manga University - I've had it around literally for years but never used it, so I gave it a shot for this piece. It's actually a wonderful drawing surface to work on - beautifully smooth and white without being overly bright. The pens are Pigma Sensei and Faber-Castell Pitt artist pens in varying tip sizes. I've used a combination of stippling, hatching, crosshatching, blocking and irregular lines to do the toning/shading on this piece.
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