He is the mind behind the popular Dragon Ball Z, the artist of Chrono Trigger and character and monster designer for the Dragon Quest series.

During the mid 70's at around the age of 21, Toriyama knew he wanted to become a manga artist and he stated that he admired the anime Astro Boy and the movie One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

Of course, Martial arts movies like Enter the Dragon and Drunken Master influenced his inner artist as well.

His career kickstarted in 78 when he submitted his first manga for a Shonen Jump prize contest.

Although he didn't make the cut, he was promoted with one shots in their magazines with illustrations from Wonderland, Today's Highlight Island, Tomato the Cutesy Gumshoe, Pola & Roid, Escape, Chobit and the freakin OG Dragon Boy.

Without a doubt, there were many more but his main success were his manga's, with Dr. Slump being his first big title that counted 230 chapters and became a massive hit in Japan.

This series finished in 84 and made room for the true goat, Dragon Ball.

It became an instant success and caused Shonen Jump to get the highest sales ranking yet.

And although Toriyama's popularity quickly grew, he has in fact a pretty shy personality that never intended to become so big.

Hence, he prohibits taking pictures during his autograph events to keep his identity low key.

On another note, he stated he was influenced by the animator Toyoo Ashida, who directed the Vampire Hunter D anime, plus his own animation Dragon Ball.

From which, he learned that separating colors instead of blending them makes the art cleaner and coloring illustrations easier.

However, his success didn't push him away from his passion and thus illustrated many one-shots such as, Mr. Ho, Lady red and Little Mamejiro.

During his career, he published dozens of chapters in Shonen Jump and published his own anthology book, Akira Toriyama's manga theater.

Furthermore, he was asked to design icon characters for magazines such as, V dragon, Ridon and more.

In 89, Dragon ball went to the next level and transformed to Z which led his career to worldwide stage.

Nevertheless it was finished in 95 and together with all his other projects put a lot of stress on him.

During the years, he had many sleepless nights which affected him on a mental level to the point he lost a clear overview on details such as as forgetting that he ever made Super Saiyan 2 by confusing it with three.

That aside, an interesting design choice was giving Goku golden blond hair to make the work load more do-able in the manga.

It goes without saying that many of his manga's were translated into amines, he himself, however, only did some of the character designs and did not participate in the animation itself.

Naturally, his talent was in high demand and the game industry wanted a piece of it.

In 86, he did character and monster designs for the Dragon Quest series.

While the Enix Corporation got quite the chunk of the Toriyama pie, their rivals Squaresoft asked him to join their dream team to work on non other then, Chrono Trigger, the best RPG ever created.

The game hit the shelfs in 95 and Toriyama created the majority of the aesthetics, including, character, monster, vehicle and the outlook of the environmental design for each timezone.

The developmental team studied his illustrations to convert it as tight as possible in pixel art and in my eyes, they nailed it.

A year later he worked on Tobal 1 and 2.

This was also the time Dragon Ball GT took center stage, and everyone loved that Goku was turned into a kid, lost his powers and battled unimportant characters after the climax of saving the universe.

It was so fun that, okay, truth to be told, Toriyama only did the character designs and stepped away.

Anyways, In the period surrounding the millennium, he focused on manga's such as Cowa, Kajiki and Sand Land.

Also, because his art style was intensely memorable, he did both album and book covers.

In the midst of the 2000s, he worked on Blue Dragon, which was well received game and quickly expanded with other installments such as Awakened Souls, and even added an anime to its repertoire.

And as you probably already knew, he kept being the Dragon Quest character artist throughout his career, including monster and vehicle designs in some of the entry's.

And especially in this series you can see that he changed the coloring side of his art style.

He went from a dark tones with hard edge highlights and shadows to more of a light colored blend in that you see with copic markers.

This makes the illustrations more cartoony which is a big difference in the overall tone of his works.

In addition, his line art changed from the sharp ink pen to thicker marker lines, creating rounder edges and angles which represents more of his earlier works.

Most of his illustrations can be seen in the artbooks based on the big franchises and his vast amount of works he did in the past.

That aside, Toriyama also did some miscellaneous work with highlights such as logos and a car design.

In case of Dragon Ball Super, the manga began in 2015 and Toriyama decided to focus on the story writing and chose a successor for the artwork;

he gave the scepter to the talented Toyotarou, who, actually, made his own Doujinshi about the franchise named Dragon Ball Heroes.

As for the massive amount of Dragon Ball games that were created through the years,

Toriyama mainly focused on add in character designs such as Bonyu For dragon ball z kakarot, android 21 in dragon ball fighter Z, sharotto and Zhahna in legends and some original characters in jump force.

Indeed, it has to be said that through the years Toriyama loves to fuse characters, well, with such an impressive career and accomplishments who can blame him?

That said, I couldn't but notice that Toriyama is obsessed with Dragons and worked on many titles that had either name or a dragon type monster in it, and because I'm a big fan of them as well, just for fun here's my tribute to his obsession.

I'm fantasy light novel author J.P Vughs and I read in an interview of Toriyama made comment on German mangakas, he wants to see more country specific manga's instead of just copies of the Japanese styles we currently know and love.

Although I understand his perspective I think no Mather your country in, you as an artist should create the art style that expresses yourself the best.