Hunting the Elusive

The joy of the chase

Artbook Review: Tinkle Illustrations 2 Byakuya Chakai

January 18th, 2009 | Category: Japanese Artists,Merchandise,Reviews

ava What happens when you encounter something so utterly awesome that it deprives you of breath? Why, you hyperventilate and keel over and die. Fortunately, I had my very own pure oxygen tank, allowing me to artificially recompose my breath and bring this report to you. Simply put, get this book (title in Japanese: てぃんくるイラストレーションズ2白夜茶会) no matter what. It’s not just a recommended book, or a should-get book…it’s a MUST-GET book. Tinkle, with this publication, has once again proven to be a master of the craft, and this book, like the first illustration collection of Tinkle (Tsukiyono Chakai) will go down in history as a legendary volume. [Download: Review pictures] [JPG version]

Byakuya Chakai (Tea Party in White Night, as I call it in English) was released in Comiket 75. Therefore, it is not one of those artbooks released through the “official systems”, i.e.: no ISBN or barcode, and not available from most online bookstores. However, it is of around the same size as normal artbooks, being 94 pages, most of which is taken up by colour illustrations.

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Yes, you only need to glance at the cover page to know that this is a psychotically superb book.

The volume starts with two “poster” spreads of illustrations which use the wide format. One of them is the jacket picture, the other is this one. As always, with review posts, I don’t deal with spreads which are bigger than the scanbed.

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Contents page. As you can see, there are two galleries: “Original” and “Works”, and then some messages, then the thumbnail contents, and then at the end of the book, Tinkle has included a previous colour work “Drink Me”, which was previously released here.

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Artbooks act as an equaliser. They provide access to artworks which the reader might not have seen before, simply by collecting all the illustrations in one central place. Therefore, Byakuya Chakai does its job. Here in the original gallery are illustrations from Tinkle releases at previous Comiket and doujin events, and more.

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Avid followers of Tinkle would have seen quite a few of these before. But that does not detract from the pleasure of seeing them again, in a form which weighs so nicely in the hand.

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And no matter how good you are at tracking an artist, there are always going to be some illustrations you have not seen before, and some which were only available previously on low resolution media like telephone cards.

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I would like to take this time now (since this is the end of the “original” gallery part) to have a look at the printing quality of this book. I did not realise this until I was scanning for this review, but it reinforces my point that this is a very high quality release.

This here is a crop from the original scanned TIFF, without any sort of processing (of course it has been auto colour adjusted as per my scanner settings). Click to see the original size.

sample

Yes. There are no screening effects at all. The printing is of such high quality that technically, I could have just converted the scans to PNG without any sort of processing (but I chose not to, because the files would have been huge without any kind of smoothing). The only “noise” really comes from the texture of the paper. Anyway, I tried to minimise the noise-reduction regime for these review pictures in respect of this fact.

The second gallery section “Works” I found to contain much more that I haven’t seen before, because I tend not to buy magazines and things just for one illustration (with a few exceptions). The first picture, by the way, featured in Etsu, and is being made into a figure. It is a spread (there are two girls in the pic), so the figure will effectively be a double-figure. Preorders will be open exclusively to Etsu readers in the next issue (April 2009).

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Some of these pictures, you can guess where they are from without referring to the thumbnail content guide.

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Oh, yeah. One caveat. This book is NSFW. We all know Tinkle is obsessed with pantsu flashes, but this book has upper body nudity as well, so if you are underage, then you need to buy this book and keep it in its wrapper until your coming-of-age birthday.

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OMG, Pocky Tsundere Girl. And yes, I checked the illustration listing, and it IS Kagami.

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Oh, look, this one is from the 2008 Valentines chocolate packet. The chocolate packet was very low resolution, so I am glad it featured here.

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The Message World section. I am not exactly sure what Tinkle has written here, but they seem to be commentary on 26 terms and ideas. Not sure if the comments are related to illustrations.

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I don’t think I need to say anymore. The search key for getting this book is “てぃんくる 75” or similar, which will spit up everything Tinkle released in Comiket 75. Unless you are super rich, don’t bother getting the goods set. This book by itself is enough.

39 comments

39 Comments so far

  1. killer121 January 18th, 2009 8:57 am

    thank you veyr much for it , i have been finding it for a long time

  2. Zeroblade January 18th, 2009 10:11 am

    Damn, that book is indeed incredibly ungodly awesome. I must have it.

  3. aoie_emesai January 18th, 2009 11:05 am

    I missed my chance for the Tsukiyo Chakai artbook. While low on cash, It’s gonna be a while till i can get my hands on any artbook >.<

  4. terry January 18th, 2009 2:22 pm

    i just found out that you have added your webby name on the pic, but it quite reasonably~
    just a comment though

  5. shin January 18th, 2009 3:25 pm

    the artbook you show has been very popular in my country-china,but there’s still no one who’s willing to scan the picture in it and share it，thanks for your book!

  6. edogawaconan January 18th, 2009 5:02 pm

    expensive T_T
    /me wonders when Tinkle will release non-doujin artbook T_T

  7. littleflower January 18th, 2009 7:14 pm

    hey shin, that’s not entirely as you said, because we all konw icie will scan this artbook, so there is no need for others to do it. ≧▽≦
    anyway thanks for sharing.

  8. icie January 18th, 2009 7:31 pm

    terry: the URL is only on the small pics on this blog page to prevent uncredited hotlinking. The actual scans you find in the archives are clean.

  9. Guy Shalev January 18th, 2009 7:47 pm

    I for one keep wishing you’d post the NSFW files, perhaps in another file, or just put a warning like you did back in the linked “Drink Me”, and let the downloaders take care of themselves.

    Then again, I probably would have wished that this didn’t cost over (US)$60, ZOMG!
    Heh :)

    Thank you, this was a great collection.

  10. Merun January 18th, 2009 8:59 pm

    If someone scan this, he most likely have 2 copies because it’s full of awesome, and not something you want to debind.

    I won’t receive mine until the end of January T_T

    For those who wants this book, a friend told me that it’s a special release, meaning there might be a normal one. It happens sometimes with doujin.

  11. icie January 18th, 2009 9:06 pm

    Guy: yes. The only reason why I shy away from NSFW stuff nowadays is because I don’t want this site to get blocked by net filters, which would affect my ability to do little admin things from work. There were only a few NSFW ones in this book anyway.

    And Merun has the point. I would love it if I had two copies, one to debind, the other to keep. But as many have noted, it costs over 60USD per copy (and the AUD is sucking right now, meaning over 100 of my money), meaning it’s not going to happen.

    I’m sure some rich bastard out there (possibly an AP/MT user, typical) will debind one of their five copies eventually and scan it.

  12. Axe January 18th, 2009 10:12 pm

    Thanks a lot!TAT
    It’s so good that I have spent hours searching it.

  13. Milk January 18th, 2009 10:41 pm

    Wow!!
    Are there all of the booklets?
    In TAOBAO there’re four 白夜茶会.
    But sold out at once…

  14. icie January 18th, 2009 10:49 pm

    Milk: what booklets? There’s one book (and if you get the set there’s a second line art doujin of little consequence). Unless you are asking about previous doujins…there’s only Drink Me in it. I’m not sure if previous full colour doujins were covered in Tsukiyono Chakai.

  15. Milk January 18th, 2009 11:48 pm

    Sorry.. I couldn’t express clearly. My English is so poor… = =
    I meant that,is 白夜茶会 a booklet of 25 pages?
    It’s a MUST-GET book..Hmm,I can’t agree more~~
    I’m not able to get one and I supposed that I would never have chance to touch it anymore my whole life…
    What is doujin？
    Tsukiyono Chakai？月夜茶会？I missed it,either.
    Once I married,I’d go to Cxx to get my real artbook! A dream,though. Haha……

  16. ritchan January 19th, 2009 4:51 am

    Music is artificial!

  17. icie January 19th, 2009 7:37 am

    Milk: No, it has 94 pages. The review only has 25 scans.

  18. Samuel January 20th, 2009 12:26 am

    Ich möchte auch eins kaufen. Aber es ist sehr selten.

  19. TCM January 20th, 2009 1:40 am

    Im sort of new here, but I do know this book, I stumbled across it on day 3 of comiket not knowing the artist be remembering seeing the art style on this blog :p
    my will be arriving in melbourne in about 2 months time, as I am now poor from my C75 trip, but I can attest, the hour long line was worth it :p

  20. Tinkle C75 artbook “Byakuya Chakai” « Blue Blue Wave January 20th, 2009 2:48 am

    [...] book called “Byakuya Chakai” (白夜茶会), a C75 edition exclusive. There is a terrific review of the artbook at “Hunting the Elusive” that includes several great scans of some of the illustrations in it. Thanks to that we’re [...]

  21. Guy Shalev January 20th, 2009 8:29 am

    I don’t understand, on one hand it is said “If someone can scan this, then they have several copies”, but on the other, you did just scan it, or am I missing something?

  22. icie January 20th, 2009 8:47 am

    Guy: we are using two definitions of scanning. “Proper scanning” would be like a Digital Release, with the whole book debound and scanned. What I have done here is a review, which involves lying the book flat on the scanner and just doing a few pages. Still, unless someone does debind and scan the whole thing, these ones here are the best we’ll have for now.

  23. Guy Shalev January 20th, 2009 9:44 am

    Ah, now I see.

    For the record, I’ve once scanned a book without debinding it. And due to the file getting deleted, I then scanned it again.
    It was so not fun.

  24. Milk January 20th, 2009 2:51 pm

    :-C
    icie様 didn’t debind the book?
    How could do it? Scan…
    The whole thing.. What could I Only do is Wait…

  25. minori January 21st, 2009 4:49 pm

    Hello

    I’m from Taiwan >w< ….(My English is poorXDD)

    Thank you for your share///

    I like てぃんくる very much!!!

  26. ling January 24th, 2009 7:31 am

    oh wow. thank you so much for sharing. i love tinkerbell art.

  27. zsx61611 January 29th, 2009 11:49 am

    Hi~
    I really like this artbook!
    Thanks a lot.^^

  28. Algester March 1st, 2009 5:47 pm

    *sigh* if only someone would do a complete scan Y_Y apparently the scans in image server are quite spread so its hard for me to obtain a complete set of art dam… and i too adore tinkle’s art

  29. dodge it March 4th, 2009 8:04 am

    hi
    does anyone know where i can buy this fucking awesome artbook from english sites because i can’t read/speak jap. so i cannot buy it from e.g. jahoo japan
    ty so much

  30. Blueeyes March 4th, 2009 10:27 am

    yes,tinkle is a god！the god of loli illust

  31. Addicted to Yahoo Japan Auctions | Hontou ni Taihen desu March 9th, 2009 10:44 am

    [...] I first stumbled upon Icie’s review of Tinkle’s 2nd artbook ~ 白夜茶会, I was in despair. As it wasn’t a commercial release, obtaining it would be [...]

  32. Akibarika April 16th, 2009 4:04 pm

    sorry about reply a very long article,
    but thanks for share the artbook.it’s really epic artbook.
    but when i seach on the interenet, google shows it has 120 pages or more , so just confused about that.
    anyway thx XD

  33. icie April 16th, 2009 4:09 pm

    Akibarika: it’s 120 pages long, but this is only a review post so I only scanned a few pages so people can see what it’s like.

  34. Shadonia » Blog Archive » Trilogie : Tinkle/Tinker Bell Works Part.1 June 25th, 2009 2:40 am

    [...] du Comiket 75. Toutes les informations que je vous donnerai concernant cet arbook proviennent de Hunting the Elusive qui m’a permit d’en apprendre plus sur le contenu de « Byakuya [...]

  35. Shadonia » Blog Archive » Le Moe August 1st, 2009 1:11 am

    [...] et  Tsukiyo no Fromage, mais aussi Tsukiyo no Chakai  (Moonlight Tea Party), Byakuya Chakai (Hunting the Elusive), Duel Dolls (Hunting the Elusive), Blossoms Colors, ou encore Drink Me (Hunting the Elusive). Pour [...]

  36. Hunting the Elusive » Digital Release: TINKLE’s Blossom Colors Celeste (C76) September 1st, 2009 7:10 am

    [...] be oriented in Portrait. A very gorgeous illustration, matching in details and ambience to the Byakuya Chakai cover. Really, I suggest rotating it yourself to see just how great this illustration is. The glass [...]

  37. mrdeus September 2nd, 2009 2:02 am

    Thanks for the great review. I’ll make sure to check back and read your other art book reviews too.

  38. Saus September 22nd, 2009 10:37 am

    May I know if it is still possible to get this book through any retail channel? Or is yahoo auctions the only way to go now?

  39. Article à thème | Le Moe | Shadonia November 6th, 2009 6:35 am

    [...] Tsukiyo no Fromage, mais aussi Tsukiyo no Chakai  (Moonlight Tea Party), Byakuya Chakai (Hunting the Elusive), Duel Dolls (Hunting the Elusive), Blossoms Colors, ou encore Drink Me (Hunting the Elusive). Pour [...]

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