Hunting the Elusive

Kaedena Akino (楓菜あきの) released Bubble Light (32 pages, full colour, A4 size) during Comic Market 77. She is an artist I have yet to cover, and in fact, this was one of the random acquisitions from Toranoana. I feel it is quite important to not just rest on stuff by famous or familiar artists, outstanding though they be, but to also challenge ourselves by exploring smaller names, as well as other styles. After all, there’s nothing too elusive about stuff everyone knows about! Personally, it’s also about pushing the envelope, seeing the sorts of character designs which appeal to me. [Review/Release][PNG]

Bubble Light is actually pretty big in dimensions, being a true A4 size, compared to most doujins. The concept of the cover art is certainly quite novel.

BTW, I just found out the orientation of the 02 cover is wrong in the release. However, due to the nature of the picture (which is not very significant, since it cannot be stitched properly anyway), I have decided to just leave it rather than re-upload.

Kaedena Akino has a style which is quite vivid, with textures almost like water-colour. Character designs are usually cute in a kiddy manner, though that’s not to say she doesn’t do mature characters.

Depending on the picture, we sometimes see the style becoming more crayon-like.

Or perhaps even the typical CG look.

I really like Kaedana Akino’s work when she embraces the darkness, like for example the first picture in the book, and the one below-left. But then again, I always had a bit of a thing for japonesque.

The colours used by Kaedena Akino (when not doing a dark atmosphere picture) are pretty vivid, and these images which fill up the entire page are quite striking.

Bubble Light, quite reasonably, does not have as many page spreads as some other books I’ve seen, which is a bit of a relief. The spine really does affect how a view receives an image.

The book covers quite a number of series. As seen above, Vocaloid got a look in earlier in the book, and here we have Touhou making its appearance.

Some of these may look familiar, since they appeared in a number of other Touhou-specific works or compilations.

We also get a bit of Rozen Maiden here.

The stuff in Bubble Light does not seem to be organised in any thematic manner (other than the series stuff covered above).

I particularly like the colours and curves in the picture below, left.

Though sometimes I find the faces a bit awkward. For example, I think it wasn’t a good idea to highlight the faces of the two girls on the below right picture.

Another spread, making two page spreads for the whole book.

At the end of the book are two thumbnail catalogue pages which provide the details about where the images came from.