Another Kind of Saiyans (Obsidian Special Ops)

Alright, last year I lost my job and it kind of put me into a depressive state, but it allowed me to get back to drawing and I decided then around X-Mas to start working on an old sketch (the sketch for this image is from last century) and realized I never did make a Dragonball Z fanart image digitally. I had made tons of hand drawn and colored ones (I uploaded quite a few these days) but never a fully fledged digital image. Finding the sketch for this image on my drawing folders one day when I browsing them I thought, this would make a great image if I ink and paint it digitally. And so I did. The time it took to make this image is considerable (more than 30 hours) but probably cause I've lost my practice over the years and also because of the particular tone coloring of dragon ball images with 3 or 4 tones per image. I also realize that I lost a lot of time trying to make the selections on my tablet PC (Samsung Windows Slate 7). While the tablet is fine for sketching and maybe inking, I lose too much time calling the tools with the pen (instead of using keyboard shortcuts or a wacom tablet on my Macs or PCs). So the next time I make such fanart I will also try other techniques and programs (maybe Illustrator) for the lineart / coloring. Maybe I should use Manga Studio ? (does any of you have any experience with it, if so don't hesitate to drop me a line and tell me about it).

As you can see while this is a Dragonball Z fanart, it portrays characters that don't exist in the Dragonball universe, only in my mind (I made started a few DBZ fan manga in my youth, even one with Raditz coming back as a Super Saiyan, which is why this image [link] exists). These were some Saiyans that were out of the planet when the Saiyan home world exploded, destroyed by Freeza. In my head they were super soldier genetically and cybernetically modified. That's why they sport a bit of a different armor, where those tubes are suppose to channel all of a Saiyan's power into the palm of their hands to deliver much powerful and deadly strikes. When they would strike the tubes would fill and channel their Ki and shine brightly like a concentrated golden Saiyan Aura. Again keep in mind this was just a little scenario in my head at the time of drawing the original piece more than 15 years ago. I didn't think much about it since then . Today it's more or less just some fictional Saiyans.

These Saiyans do resemble some of our well known heroes though. The one on the left kinda looks like Bejita (Vegeta) but with a hairstyle more reminiscent of Wolverine (that's what I wanted to achieve at least), the one on the right is more traditional and could be another brother of Son Gokou (he just has a hairstyle that is more pronounced to end on a side, this is no wind effect, but the hairstyle for this particular Saiyan). Because he looked too similar to Son Gokou, at the time I thought I'd add a scar to differentiate him when (and if) they would face one another.

If you like this fanart I will probably draw a few more, I've come across some really nice sketches from these days that I could give similar treatment in terms of colors and composition.

If you like my art, I encourage you to check out my own manga : The Kyrian Chronicles, Dragon Alliance on Apple iPad [link]



More info about TKC on iPad here : [link]

Process : original sketch hand drawn and scanned, inked & Colored in Photoshop.

Background : Mojoworld render and Photoshop composition. It's possible you saw that background some place else as it was part of a background package I was selling on renderosity in the past. It was also a downloadable desktop wallpaper on my old site saiyan.ch (closed).