"Winter 2012/12" by Holon

 Alright, this time around we have a real obscure one - the artist, thirteen (!) years later, doesn't seem to be active anymore - no Twitter, no website, and nobody on Pixiv seems to be a match. So yeah, all we have is this B&W, A4, 16 pages sketchbook which... well, it's the typical DIY dōjin booklet that an amateur artist would put out in the mid 2010s. 

Not to say that this is a bad thing at all. Sure, the contents are entirely derivative: the dōjinshi consists entirely of fanart from series such as Evangelion, Monogatari, Madoka and others, but it's pretty good character fanart, with an excellent sense of dynamics and composition; a bit lacking (that is to say, entirely lacking) in the background department, but that's fairly typical for the product. The cover illustration is particularly nice, I must say. 

So yeah, not much to comment about this one. A nifty, little piece of ephemera - nothing more, nothing less. Still, if you happen to know more about the author (or, even better, have a contact, please do let me know).

"By The Window" by Umishima Senbon (海島千本)

 Here goes another small collection from a big time digital illustrator. Umishima Senbon has a huge following on Twitter (yup, still Twitter to me) and is now in the business of proper artbooks publishing and professional illustration work, both in print and for anime; still, as it's now the norm for the sort of stuff you'll see in this blog, what really is of interest to me is their dōjin work -aka, their self published stuff that, in my opinion, often turns out to be a better display of the artist's inner workings and quirks.

So we wind back to 2021, with a small (24 pages), A4, mostly full color collection of illustrations themed around 'windows', in case the title didn't give it away.  The format is one we're accustomed with by now: the illustration, usually a full page, is displayed side-by-side with development sketches, showing the process from a simple outline to the completed artwork. Sure, it's a blatant way to pad the page count, but it's also interesting to see not only the artist's own process, and compare it to others'. Umishima's style of line and coloring has, at times, a watercolor-like quality to it, eschewing the plastic sheen so typical of PIXIV-derived illustration: lines are rarely bold, and instead color contrast is used to fill out volumes and shapes. It reminded me a bit of Sahara Mizu's color stuff, personally. 

Not a whole lot more to say, really. A nice, short collection from an illustrator that has clearly made it big. Stay tuned because, next time, I have some real strange work to introduce you...

"Exotica" by Nekosuke

 Oh yeah! After a far too long hiatus, we're so back, with another fresh batch of Mandarake purchases ready to be hastily discussed and displayed in all of their grainy glory. As for the actual reason why I've been away this long... well, I just was. I also made a megawad for Doom in the meantime. 

Our first offering for our return to style is, by pop culture standard, a relic - a relic from 2015, to be exact. ねこ助 (Nekosuke) is a popular and affirmed illustrator, sporting almost 200k followers on Twitter (yes, it's Twitter, get rekt), and a similarly beefy following on both PIXIV and Instagram. While working within the usual canon of bishoujo illustration, they have a very distinct visual style, borrowing less from anime and more from sources such as childer's books, European illustrations and that whole aesthetics that, today, would be lumped somewhere in the cottagecore orbit. Their spindly, emaciated young girls, often accompanied by painstakingly rendered animals, live in a washed out world of near monochrome, occasionally touched by a hint of pastel. Very refined and porcelain doll-ish. 

Anyway, I've been eyeing for a while a specific publication of theirs, titled "Exotica" - a short (20 pages), full color, A5 illustration book depicting Nekosuke's signature girls' interactions with a select group of animals, in pairs of two. Yeah, I know what you're thinking... no yiffing here, sorry. What we get, instead, is a series of two page spreads: on the left page, a full body of the girl and the animal, aesthetics trimmed to match; on the right page, the girl enjoying (?) the company of said animal. While all this might sound cutesy, there is a distinct undertone of darkness in Nekosuke's illustrations: the girls, at times, seem to be worried or frightened by their totem animal's oppressive presence, and the vaguely dark fairytale-like limericks accompanying each pair hint at a darker truth behind the facade. Why should we ask the deer to tread lightly? spooky.

Visually, the booklet is well within Nekosuke's style, delicate illustrations that appear, at times, once colored but now greyed by time and wear. The environments are well constructed, the animals are for the most part close to realistic in their portrayal, and the doll-like girls are appropriately different yet similar in a Platonic ideal kind of way. A style that, from what I can see, even ten years later Nekosuke wouldn't stray from.