夢想少女 by 宇一 (2019)

 Artbook time! and a very nice one it is, by another far from unknown illustrator - 宇一 (Uiti) can count on more than 100k followers on Twitter , has just published a new, non-dōjin artbook, and is generally one of those illustrators you will often find featured on daily Pixiv collections. They sport an increasingly common visual take on the bishōjo pinup genre, which sets aside the shiny, plastic-like sheen of anime-inspired visuals for a more daring, blocky visual language based around bold colors mutuated from 2000s' vector art. It reminds me a fair bit of Hirotaka Tanaka, in fact.

 夢想少女 (Reverie Girl) is a full color, 18 pages booklet collection of pinups by Uiti, centered around the concept of bautiful girls and daydreams / dreams imagery. Girls dancing with moon and stars, sailing over seas of crystal, bizzarre animals come together to create prime Pixiv material. Uiti's style is one I really dig: extremely clean, at times almost geometric in design, with little interest in backgrounds which are often abstract even when they are the center of the image's theme. There is definitely quite a bit of pop-like Murakami  / Satoshi Kon visual inspiration, although the themes themselves are not a particularly large departure from your typical 'cool anime illustration' floating around the internet. This is all about style, and sometimes that's all you need. 

BALMY DAYS by Hiten

 One could say that shoujo illustrations are a dime a dozen in the doujinshi world, and they'd be right - which is why I am saving all the dimes I find, 'cause I simply can't get enough of that. Young, idealized women are the sort of blank canvas subject that can accomodate more or less any art style, which is why they are such a popular subject in my opinion - there will also always be a market for them in Japanese otaku media, which I guess is another reason why the subject is pervasive, and pretty much all you'll find on Pixiv nowadays. Not that I'm complaining...

While I usually focus on smaller, obscure creators, this time around I'll present a doujinshi by someone who has made it big. Hiten is a Taiwanese illustrator who, in the rags-to-riches story so typical of the doujin  world, started out self-published and has now a massive following on all platforms, and a recently (relatively, April 2023) released artbook. It's very easy to see how they could make it so big: they have that super-polished, highly skilled, perhaps slightly generic style that just screams 'light novel cover art' or 'small run elite rice brand packaging'. Not that I know if they did the latter, but they surely did the former, and their art can be found on the cover of generic light dross sorry, I meant hits like Gimai Seikatsu and 三角の距離は限りないゼロ.

What I have here today is a self-published collection from 2022, very short at barely 16 pages but full color, stapled spine but immaculately designed (Hiten hired an external, some Tadano Yukiko, for the job). It features both two-pages spreads, as well as single page pinups with a rough sketch on the opposite page. The subject is invariably, you guessed it, pretty girls in the cool, largely pastel fashion straight out of LARME, though there are a few touches of neon here and there. All rather chaste, we are far removed from fanservice and such, yet the generic beauty of the figures, matched with the graphical skill of Hiten, is certainly the main (the only) attraction point. 

One could argue that the artist's style is as generic as they come: there is little flair or the famous 'oddity in beauty' professed by Edgar Alla Poe - the images as a whole form a sort of Arcadian blob of aurea mediocritas that shows little personality, but an extremely high degree of skill. I'll admit, I like my visual arts a bit more peppered, but that comes down to personal preference. It's visually perfect - in the end, a bit too perfect for my taste I guess.