blog:nattoli, tag:touhou

Touhou Souka is a collection of illustrations of Touhou girls pictured with flowers that match their looks and personalities by the circle Lunade Luna. I hadn't purchased anything by the circle before, but I did look up Nabeshima Tetsuhiro's vast array of Touhou art work before hand, so I was pretty clear on what to expect.

I was really excited to see the new work from Aka Ringo based on the preview images for Hanamaru and the excellence of the previous AZ + PLAY winter Comiket publication, 0 [LOVE]. So for me personally, the bar was set a little too high and Hanamaru fell way down under it.

This feels like an odd way to describe an art book, but Pixiv Girls Collection 2010 is really a lot of fun. It's enjoyable to look through, and you can take it to the next level where every time you see an art piece you like (and this will happen a lot, I guarantee it) you can go to the artist's Pixiv page immediately and see more art work, because this time they've included the Pixiv artist ID number next to each illustration in addition to the name!

12 Color Girls is a collaboration doujinshi between Spice and Wolf light novel illustrator Ayakura Juu and an artist I was previously unfamiliar with, Daizan. This full color collection features girls making use of various everyday school supplies like staplers, paper, tape and so on, in rather creative ways.

MOEOH Selection's Ten Colors ~ Juu Nin To Iro ~ finally came out last week, after weeks of hearing and talking about it. And if you're at all familiar with the Dengeki MOEOH magazine, you'll know that means art work from the 10 artists featured each month for the past two years: Satoshi Kiba, Aoi Kimizuka, Koharu Sakura, Tinkle, Mamoru Naruse, Yu Narumi, Matsuryu, Suigun Murakami, Morinaga Korune, and Mitha.

When the To Love-Ru (とらぶる) manga series finished its run last year, you just knew an art book would be sure to follow. And several months later, we get To Love-Ru Illustrations Love Color, a 98-page full color collection of the manga illustrations that includes nearly all of the color art works published for the series along with a few newly drawn ones as well.

Kurogin (黒銀) wasn't an artist I was following, but I'd recently seen his work in Dragon Magazine for Chrome Close Chronicle so my interest was peaked. And it was extra lucky that Kurogin's C77 doujinshi was aptly titled Archive Illustrations which included primarily his color works from 2006 through 2009, so I was able to get a very extensive introduction to this artist's work.

Though it's an artist I've skipped in the past, I decided to grab Aoki Sin's's newest illustration collection, COLORS 7 from Comiket 77. I think it's in part due to his increased exposure, seeing his art work featured in both Megami Creators and 100 Masters of Bishojo Painting really helped to rekindle my interests. That, and his change in coloring style are making Aoki Sin one artist to watch out for ^^

D. Gray-man Illustrations NOCHE came out at the beginning of Febraury this year, and marks the first illustration collection for the 6-year old series. This art book focuses entirely on the manga art by Hoshino Katsura, with 86 pages of color illustrations that were for the most part featured only in issues of Weekly Shounen Jump and Jump Square.

Zangetsu Schnee is filled with colorful illustrations of characters from some of (I would guess) Zinno's favorite shows from last season; Bakemonogatari, Darker than Black: Ryūsei no Gemini, and Needless. Like previous Zangetsu volumes, it's on the short side with 16-pages total including the covers.

The first thing that struck me about Yoshida Seiji's art works were his incredibly detailed backgrounds. After more exploring, I learned that he is first and foremost a background illustrator, and that with his Comiket 77 doujinshi titled PAST along with recent work on video games under the circle name TNK, he is expanding into the great wide world of character illustrations.

I'd first noticed Nyanya's art work while I was browsing Pixiv to see various artists' Comiket 77 promotional images right before the event. It wasn't so much the style of the illustration, but rather the cat girl herself, whom is basically an inverse of one that H2SO4 frequently draws that really caught my attention and made me want to buy this.