Naruto: Team StuffOnTheirBacks

Gaara, Temari and Kankuro from Naruto.

I'm not sure if the teams in the chuunin exam have formal names or are just called after their hidden village, but I always think of these three as Team StuffOnTheirBacks.

This was my first ever Naruto fanart, and my entry to this year's AVcon art contest, in the anime category. I love Naruto to bits, these three especially, but I really wanted to focus on Temari, since I love her hair and her attitude and she always seems to be overlooked in favour of Gaara, just because Gaara's totally awesome. Poor Temari (and Kankuro for that matter... according to ~chibinezu we have the same birthday. No I don't know how people worked out when anime characters were born, maybe there's a slumber party episode I missed where they talk about that kind of thing)

I blew the dust off my colour pencils because this year I wanted a non digital entry to kind of make a point, but looks yucky in the scan, the original is A3 and as well as looking a bit more impressive there was a lot more subtlty that just doesn't come across from seeing it on a monitor. Not that it excuses it's shortcomings - most notably Gaara's receding hairline and poor poor Kankuro's messed up facial markings (what was I thinking?? His forehead line was actually an inking mistake (I slipped and made it too skinny) but in hindsight I should have just reinked it and hoped the purple would make the incorrect linework hard to see because he looks stupid as he is) His markings are so awesome and I botched them, arragh!

Still, in spite of that and a few other niggling problems (the smudge on Temari's leg was where I brushed the page right near the end, it bugs the heck out of me) it still got first place in the anime category by popular vote, so yay! And thankyou everyone who came past at AVcon!

Media Used : brush inked and coloured with prismacolor pencil