Rui Kousaki's GLASS HEART 5 is another beautiful full-color collection in his great series of illustration doujins put out during the Comic Markets. If you're not familiar with the artist, he has a really unique style (especially with the way he does faces) and does a lot of fantasy-style art work, with knights, armor and elves. Though of course, not all of the illustrations are like that.

The cover illustration is new for the collection, and re-appears in full inside this 32-page (covers included), B5 sized doujinshi. There are comments throughout the illustrations, but fortunately not on the art work itself ^^;

When I first got into Kousaki Rui's work, the one thing that put me off was the way he draws and colors the noses. But after a while, I actually started to find them cute. At the very least, it's definitely not a standard anime-style nose. Have you ever focused in on one aspect of an artist's work and choose to dislike it because of that? Did you later change your mind like I did? ^^;

Here's more of the fantasy-styled art work I was talking about earlier. Kousaki Rui's last Comiket release was a black and white illustration collection titled Monochrome Heart. A couple of the illustrations in this book were first featured as monochrome art works in the C76 release. I didn't get it though, I don't intentionally collect black and white collections because most of the time, those same illustrations end up in color in another doujinshi release. Sometimes I think artists release sketch collections due to time constraints more than anything else. But I don't really know ^^

Though the artwork is mostly original characters, there are a couple of Nyan Koi! illustrations in this doujinshi. Actually, a lot of artists had Nyan Koi! fan arts in their doujins this season but it's a really cute show :3

This is another one I bought off of Toranoana and there's still plenty in stock. Probably because it's a bit expensive for a doujinshi at ￥1365. It's worth it in my opinion, but I will probably be kicking myself about it later if this artist puts out a commercial art book ^^;

• Title: GLASS HEART 5
• タイトル: GLASS HEART 5
• Release Date: 12/31/2009
• Pages: 32 (including covers)
• Buy: Toranoana