Hunting the Elusive

Shunya Yamashita is a fairly popular artist be it in Japan or elsewhere. Personally, I didn’t really like his stuff because of the realism and the faces of the girls, who always looked like they were nymphomaniacs. I totally understand how testosterone-driven guys might be very attracted to the oft-scantily-clad and luscious bodies of the characters he draws, but the structure of the face and the snubby noses did not strike my fancy. That said, it seemed only fair to give this artist a chance, and so I bought the latest artbook from him, which is Wild Flower (2762 yen). [Download: full size PNGs of the scans from this post]

Now, I know this artbook has been out for some time, and indeed there have been previous reviews about this, but here’s my take, so bear with me.

I know also that my opening paragraph was pretty mean. “Poor Shunya Yamashita,” you must be thinking, “How can icie be so petty about his artwork, when people like Imperial Boy do far worse drawings of girls?”

(Even if you were not thinking that before, now you are, because I made you read that sentence, haha.)

Well that is true. But Shunya-fans can console themselves, because that’s most of the mean things I’m gonna say about his art for now. It gets better, I promise.

I like, for example, the colours that he uses. Realism aside, he uses bright colours, and lots of them. The colour coordination in some of his drawings are outstanding.

Additionally, he puts quite a lot of detail into his pictures. The armour and weapons are decorated intricately, and best of all, shaded to give it all a very tactile look. You look at the cover picture of the artbook for example, and your mind caresses the curves and grooves on the armour and sword.

So let’s start. Wild Flower has a number of main sections (and some minor ones I don’t bother covering). “Unpublished Works”, “Works for Figures”, “Works for Videogames”, “Works for Cardgames”, “Works for Web and T-shirts”, “Works for Magazines and Books”, and “Monochrome”. This is then followed by a monochrome section, and an overall index and comments.

As you might be expecting, this artbook is not really safe for work, although most of the risky stuff are only in the small drawings.

Note I have represented herein the pictures I liked the most, leaving quite a lot of stuff out.

The first section opens fairly nicely, dominated by full colour drawings, as well as girls “standalone” against the white page. One thing quickly becomes apparent: there is a large amount of these “standalone” pictures.

Nearing the end of the section, we get pages like the last scan, with multiple drawings of the girls in various poses, some coloured, some monochrome. There are also two pages of “this is what I did in Photoshop”.

It is only to be expected that the work for figures section would be dominated by these “standalone” pictures. If you are soaked in the figure scene like I am (although I don’t buy anymore, I still look through the news on them"), you would have seen most of these. There are a few which I wouldn’t mind having as a figure, for example the last armoured one.

BTW, the second last figure acquisition I got was the bust of Karin (second page, top right corner). That’s not open yet, pending some new equipment, hopefully.

More standalone stuff, this time characters from games.

This section represented the middle of the book and was the longest. It was also, IMO, the weakest section. I’m not sure about you, but I am totally not into the whole artbook thing for the purposes of seeing fat hairy men, monsters, gross creatures or warriors.

(They’re not in the scans, but they are there.)

I mean, some people might like warriors, and I guess he put them all in there kinda as a “this is a complete representation of what I have done”, but really, it’s such a weak part of the entire thematic fabric of the book, as if he can’t really decide if he should just stick with the hot girls thing, or go for a varied “I can draw monsters like HR Giger” approach.

The way I see it, a major draw of his work is in the hot girls, and he should just make up his mind. Let’s face the fact that he’s not going to get a career drawing hairy men and disgusting creatures.

We get the whole “He can draw a variety of things, not just hot girls” thing already, since a few of his full-colour illustrations have guys in them. If there were other hot drawings he could have put in, I say he should have replaced the standalone men and monsters with them.

Now, all this might sound a bit harsh, but it’s just a criticism of the artbook, not the art itself. Granted, I did not find that stuff aesthetically pleasing (a subjective observation), but they still represented a bit of that positive stuff I said before, with the attention to detail and visually tactile textures.

Rough patch out of the way, the artbook gets better. I must admit when I got to the Card Games section, the illustrator had me converted to his side.Some of the lushest drawings and colours are represented in this section, and certainly the characters here escape the nuanced feel of the Figures section.

There are still some disgusting men illustrations here, but luckily relegated to the end of the section, easily flipped over.

This Web and T-shirt section is fairly short, but it supports just two of the pastel, flat-coloured style of illustrations. Some people might think the flat-coloured thing just means it’s one step up from monochrome, but personally, I think these are really good. They really emphasise the softness of the colour, and provide a good relief from the whole realistically-shaded thing. I think more of these types of drawings would have been really appealing.

The last section is also quite outstanding, but very short. The drawings here are mostly full-page, full colour ones.

You notice by now that this artist specialises in what I am calling “standalone” girls. These are illustrations of girls by themselves, without interaction with the environment. They are overlaid on each other (for compilation pictures with a number of characters), or just layered on top of a background illustration. There are a few exceptions, but hey, standalone works well too. Perhaps it’s such an integral part of his style that if his characters were too embedded within their environment, we wouldn’t recognise it as his work. But it is perhaps because of this emphasis on the characters (in scale and focus) that his characters are so striking and stand out.