Ashiato ~Kantoku Art Works~11 min read
Reading Time: 5 minutesAshiato ~Kantoku Art Works~ (あしあと~カントクアートワークス~) turns out to be as colorful and vibrant as expected, filled with 144-pages of beautiful girls ranging from original creations to copyright characters. The book is B5 sized, so it’s smaller than most art books, but about the size of the average doujinshi.
The cover illustration is new for the art book, and the same illustration reappears towards the back of the book as a two-page spread without the title text. In total there are six new illustrations drawn exclusively for Ashiato. All three of the images above are new.
There is no index, or table of contents but the images do have notes next to them to indicate where they were originally published. They’re not in chronological order either, so you get a mix of newer art work next to older ones, so there are some style changes from page to page. The images above were for the most part originally published in Magicu and E☆2 (Etsu) magazines.
Chara☆Mel Magazine is another that regularly features Kantoku’s illustrations, and those are included in here as well up through volume 10. It’s sad to think just how many magazines you’d have to buy just to keep up with one artist ^^;
Kantoku has also done a fair amount of merchandise art work for some of the popular anime and doujinshi stores in Tokyo like Toranoana, Melonbooks, and K-Books. I’d actually seen most of the illustrations in other books I’d purchased, but it’s always nice to have a collection in one place. The last illustration above was drawn for Megami Creators volume 11 and may show up again in the Girl’s Avenue Illustrations art book out in February next year.
Aside from two monochrome illustrations for K-BOOKS and one sketch page in the back, the entire art book is in color.
Several of the copyright art works featured are from the game Ameserasa (アメサラサ～雨と) and other CUFFS related works. But there are also some illustrations done by Kantoku as guest arts for other series like Fate/Stay Night, Kimikiss, and To Heart.
From about page 50 through 66 are some illustrations that really feel like filler content. They’re from something that ran in Dragon Magazine, but since I’m not really interested, I’m not going to look it up ^^; I’d consider these some of the only generic-looking illustrations in here.
Back to the colorful stuff. Surprisingly, there weren’t a huge amount of illustrations from Kantoku’s doujin publications in here. So even if you’ve purchased his doujinshi, you won’t feel like you’re getting a lot of repeat illustrations.
The Hatsune Miku illustration above right appeared in a Vocaloid illustration collection along side art work by H2SO4, Yasu, Rokuwata Tomoe, Hinayuki Usa, Kagome and a lot more. I’ll have to remember to review it sometime…
Several of the illustrations above appeared in Kantoku’s Check x Check (チェック×チェック) series of doujinshi. But as I mentioned before, it’s not a lot when considering the overall number of illustrations.
And for better or for worse, some of the illustrations that appeared in Kantoku’s 5th Year Memorial (reviewed here) re-appear in this art book. Most noticeably, the cover illustrations from 5th Year, the original Kurumi illustration in wet clothing, the illustrations on the fan and several of the home page illustrations. I would say most of the art work from pages 116 through 135 appeared in the 5th Year Memorial and on Kantoku’s website at some point, though they were for the most part printed at smaller sizes previously.
The illustration on the top left was used as the cover for a limited version of this art book sold only at Animate and Gamers stores in Tokyo. The page count is the same in both, so it may be safe to assume the covers are the only difference. Ashiato ~Kantoku Art Works~retails for ￥2,940, and considering the assortment of illustrations in this book, it’s a great deal that would satisfy anyone’s Kantoku cravings for the year :3
