Grande Desserts Risa Miyasu Color Illustrations

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Miyasu Risa released several items with her circle D.N.A. Lab during Comiket 77, but the one item I wanted was her artbook-sized illustration book Grande Desserts. This A4-sized, 100-page (covers included) collection has 74 pages in full color and plenty of illustrations ranging from original characters, to fan arts and from sexy to completely not-safe-for-work illustrations ^^; It’s a very thorough collection, to say the least.

I don’t actively collect Risa Miyasu’s doujinshi, but her work does find its way into other things I buy like the Girls Girls Girls Illustrations series by E☆2 (Etsu) and magazines. I was enticed to buy this one because it’s pretty much the size of a commercial art book.

The coloring style is quite unique though, especially on the skin. It’s a more painted-look than you usually see with this style of cute girls illustrations. The pages up to 28 are filled with Miyasu Risa’s original character designs, with a few that were drawn exclusively for this collection.

The one thing I really dislike about this book is the paper it’s printed on. It’s a heavily textured paper and the pages even feel a bit rough to the touch compared to a matte-shine finished page. Details also really get lost in the darker areas of an illustration with this kind of printing. Though it was likely less expensive overall to produce because of it.

Miyasu Risa also does a lot of fan art work, and it really shows in this book with pages 30 through 61 all dedicated to copyright characters. Several are very ecchi with illustrations of Tifa from FFVII and very not safe for work illustrations of Ashe from FFXII. This collection is R-18, so a good part of it consists of NSFW images.

There’s also Miyasu Risa’s renditions of the twins from Lucky Star, C.C. from Code Geass, Nagi Sanzenin from Hayate the Combat Butler, CLANNAD, Vocaloid, To Heart, and lots of others.

The last section before the index and a few sketch illustrations is dedicated to Touhou. Miyasu Risa has actually done quite a few Touhou illustrations and comics with the circle D.N.A. Lab. The Touhou section is small though, covering 10 pages in total.

The monochrome pages go from 75 to 98, and include rough sketches of several of the pictures in the book. Along with the sketches of some illustrations are the line arts. There are two pages of finished monochrome illustrations and a 6-page index with artist’s comments as well.

As I’m not an avid collector of Miyasu Risa’s work, I can’t say much regarding repetition with this and her other doujinshi. This collection does span several years, as many of the illustrations were covers for doujinshi as early as 2005. I do think it’s a great start for people who like me don’t regularly collect this artist’s works.