K-ON! Super Illustrations Vol. 1

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I was quite surprised by the contents in the new K-ON! Super Illustrations Vol. 1. It features a combination of official art by the manga creator, Kakifly, and tribute illustrations by several well-known artists. It makes it look like there is not enough content for a full art book. Seeing as how it’s labeled as volume one, maybe we can expect more of these in the future.

The book starts out with a new long poster with Yui on one side and Mio on the other. If you’re familiar with Kakifly’s illustrations, they’re not a lot likeYukiko Horiguchi‘s anime designs.

Kakifly’s art work takes up the first 33-pages of this 120-page art book. The illustrations are mainly cover arts from manga volumes and covers that appeared on Manga Time Kirara Magazine.

The rest of the art work in this collection is technically fan art. Much like last year’s Code Geass Heroine’s Tribute, each artist has a profile page and an illustration.

There really is a wide range of artists in this book, with several I’ve never heard of and others that I’ve seen plenty from. Kanzaki Hiro, Sakana, Hinata Mutsuki, Takehito Harada and Takuya Fujima are some of the more popular artists in this book.

It’s amazing to see how different artists take on Mugi’s very distinctive eyebrows. Some of the artists in this section are Nilitsu, Shin Hashimoto, Yohichi Ariko, Kyo, Mirura Yano, and Siro.

These two are extra cute! Mio illustrated by Meruchi Nanase and Yui illustrated by Zekkyou. I really like the way Meruchi Nanase does the hair and the lighting, and just makes Mio look really cute.

In total, there are 40 different artists in the book, each with one illustration. Most stay true to the character designs and personalities of the K-ON! girls. There index lists the official art works by Kakifly.

There really is a lot of high quality art work by many up-and-coming artists!