グラスタイル Summer 2010 by Range Murata

 It kinda feels like cheating, whenever I feature dōjin work from etablished artists, who probably don't need whatever tiny publicity this blog allows (blog that, by the way, is doing quite well visits-wise... thanks for stopping by! And feel free to take a look at my own stuff if you feel like it). Still, this time around it's about an illustrator I actually kind of idolized a lot of years ago, the quality of the product is fairly high... and I already bought it, so might as well get a post out of it.

People who follow anime, and especially 2010's anime probably happened to come across a guy by the name of Range Murata. He's best known as a character designer, having contributed to a number of anime series and videogames (Last Exile, Blue Submarine n.6, Shangri-La, Animatrix, Robot etc), as well as dabbling in cover art, fgurines design, and apparel. Not sure what he's up to now, as I don't really keep up with anime that much, but I don't see his name thrown around as it used to, so there's that. Probably had his heyday. 

What we're dealing with today is a dōjinshi of his, the 2010 illustration collection titled グラスタイル - which also wins the prize as history's most deceiving cover art as, if you're not familiar with Murata's work, you'd probably expect an alt-photography collection. Instead, you get a 26 pages, full color collection of pin-ups, mostly unrelated to his mainstream work: young girls, sometimes accompanied by dashing and burly male counterparts, dressed up in Murata's signature brand of retro-futuristic, dieselpunk apparel. 

So, content wise, we're in standard anime-esque dōjinshi territory. Now, it's undeniable that Murata knows his stuff, and visually the illustrations are stunning. Aside from a weird, uncanny valley-ish tendency to pair wide eyed anime girls with hyper-realistic drawn males, which I find a bit disjointed and off putting, he clearly has a mastery of color, shape, composition and style. Still, as a whole, the dōjinshi feels a bit... inconsequential. I have a feeling that his stuff probably works better as part of a larger project, as his draftsmanship feels a bit wasted on 'just' pin up illustrations. Also, the book almost entirely lacks commentary, work-in-progress and such, which often make the difference for me in illustration collections.