Hunting the Elusive

I started following Hinako Satomi (LiZ) shortly before Comic Market 76 for various reasons, and color decoration is her first full-colour book, released at the last Comiket. In a way, this artist has quite a bit of potential, but still has some inconsistencies in her art (by way of example, the front page picture for her website). I guess in a way, this artist is also a typical moe-type drawer, although I would probably put her style closer to Kantoku than anyone else. [Review] [PNG]

color decoration is 18 pages long (including cover, 20 pages if you include blank inside covers). 5 pages are guest illustrations. Again, please excuse the colours, which are caused by the scanner.

So as you can probably tell from the cover, LiZ does not shy away from fanservice.

It’s Kantoku’s fault that whenever I see school girls with checker patterns (or whatever they’re called) I get reminded of his stuff.

And there is one page spread. I think this is an original character though it looks like Koanata. Note again that review scans aren’t really stitchable.

I quite like this last one for the lighting and the use of perspective.

There are four guest illustrations, but I am only putting these two up here. The other two were so horrible I would take points away from this book if I were scoring it. Some stuff needs to be left unprinted, but I had to scan them anyway to completeness’ sake.

Conclusion: this is not a bad effort for a first full-colour book. I think LiZ put quite a lot of effort into the pictures for this book, or she chose the best works, as none of the pictures seem to display irregularities. Stylistically, the girls she draws are really cute although nothing which really challenges convention. That said, that’s usually good enough for us.

However, I really think it’s a waste of two pages of colour printing to have printed those two guest pictures – I would rather LiZ have put in more of her work than have to even look at those two. Go check the archives and you’ll see what I’m talking about.