Hunting the Elusive

This is a lighter post than most, and I guess it’s mostly to ask your input as well. The latest Touhou song release event was Reitaisai, and during that time, a flood of Touhou remixes threatened to fill my hard disks. What I did was dump a whole lot of them into my mp3 player and proceed to plow through them with a shuffle function. After a month or so of listening, I picked my three favourites.

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Boy, let me tell you, after a bit of an overload with scanning, I can’t really do many more review posts and scan releases for a while — it just gets a bit intense trying to time everything, since scanning and processing take around 2 days to do in total. I have found one or two cool things via the net, but those will have to wait until certain things arrive. Luckily, I have a backlog of releases I can eat into, so here we go. Studio SDT (Yuuki Tatsuya), which I have covered before for Touhou illustrations, released Trashbox #16 on 31 December 2007 (Comiket 73). It’s not so much Touhou-focused but rather has other illustration works. [Download: RAR archive (130MB)]

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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]

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"Ashita no Ashioto" is one of POP’s latest releases at the time of writing. I’m not really clear on what it is, but it’s kind of like an imagining of a world/scenario populated with characters and love stories. There is quite a bit of text, composed by "Tukune Asagiri". The credits read like a game, really, but I don’t think it’s going to be a game. There are two books: the actual Ashita no Ashioto book, and an "image sketch book". Both are fairly thin, so I did not bother to split them up (numbering is continuous). The books also come in a folder thing. [Download full size PNGs: 656MB]

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Also known as the Headphones Catalogue and Guidebook, this 1800 yen volume is in many ways an official book follow-up to the original Headphone Guide for Autumn 2007, which was supposedly a doujin release. It includes many (possibly all) of the illustrations from that book, plus a whole lot more. For those who are unfamiliar with what the concept is, the Headphone Reader is basically a collection of illustrations of girls wearing various RL headphones. The more serious content is non-pictorial: detailed reviews and information about each headphone, which has been tested and analysed by the author, and a variety of music, anime, and eroge industry insiders, along with help from Stax and Sony. [Download: PNG Full Size Archive]

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I must start off this post by thanking soloista, without whom this release would not be possible. Digging into his own pocket, he got Amazon Japan to send me a copy of this book for debinding and scanning. I will of course be sending back the debound pages to him along with a token of my gratitude. The book, which I have previously reviewed, consists of 208 pages of CG illustration colouring instruction. Three example images by YukiUsagi are included, as are line art versions. Of the example images, two are given in-depth attention in the book, while the last one is just a bonus picture. [Download: PNG Archive | 595 MB]

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Well, I got an Amazon shipment yesterday containing some books and magazines. I’ll be going through them bit by bit in the near future. One of the magazines I got was CHARA*MEL volume 5 (August 2008 issue). As some of you might already know, CHARA*MEL is the magazine which has Cage in Lunatic Runagate, but it has some other interesting visual material within as well, which I *might* have a look at some time, including the latest Itou Noizi illustrated game "Flyable Heart". But volume 5 of the magazine also came with a bonus CD. [Download: ISO (255MB)] [Download: Wallpaper archive (26MB)]

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The story starts with tickets. Tickets of all sorts and sizes, a physical, black and white record of my solitude. Single ticket to the Death Cab for Cutie gig, single ticket to Dark Knight movie on the first day of opening (at a cinema with reportedly bigger screen and digital quality), single bus ticket to Narrabeen. But the ticket to Narrabeen is the middle of the story. It is only the first chapter of my wonderings to be documented, and hopefully not the last. Perhaps you will accompany me in my journeys of discovery, borne, as it were, by the bits and bytes which compose the pictures, oblivious to the gritty pain that a physical journey must entail. [Photo Archives for this post]

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Yes, this is the release I have been waiting for. Tokiame is an outstanding illustrator of Touhou pictures (ranking up there with Studio SDT and Capura L). He is pretty close to being a "canon" Touhou illustrator, having worked with ZUN himself on Touhou Bougetsushou ~ Cage in Lunatic Runagate. His previous doujin/illustration release was "Carefree Scribble SOU+", although there are around three or four other thin colour illustration books before that. "Byou - Touhou Kaki Tuduri" (not sure about the romanisation, but that’s what he called it, so I am going with that) is a 32 page (30 if you don’t count the blank pages inside the cover) colour and monochrome illustration book released at the recent Reitaisai. [PNG Download: 592MB]

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