Shigenori Soejima Art Works 2004-2010

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Shigenori Soejima Art Works 2004-2010 came out in August. It showcases the artist’s illustrations from the games Persona 3 & 4, and Stella Deus with a handful of other works. The book presentation works well for such a beautiful set of art works. Most of the illustration have a full page.

The art book itself has a fog slip-cover over the printed cover and obi, making the cover illustration text free. Shigenori Soejima Art Works is 160-pages long, with a total of 87 illustrations.

Many of the works sit opposite a solid colored page. It either has image information or the line art in a small corner. The first part of the book is Persona 3, and you’re only getting an illustration on every other page.

A few illustrations that could have fit completely on one page have overlap on the adjacent page. In some cases, it’s no more than an inch of the illustration spread over the gutter of the book. Though at first, the color coordinated empty pages seemed wasteful, they do look good.

The Persona 3 section is the largest section in the book, totaling 39 illustrations over 65 pages.

The next section features Persona 4 illustrations, but also includes some crossover Persona works and a Persona -Trinity Soul- illustration. Several of the Persona 4 illustrations come from goods like game magazine covers as well as CDs.

There are even merchandise illustrations included, like those from telecards, postcards and clear files. There are a total of 21 illustrations from Persona 4.

The imagery of Stella Deus is most reminiscent of the cover style art work for Shigenori Soejima Art Works 2004-2010. This rounded painterly-style does appear in the Persona 3 section, but it stopped by Persona 4. There are only nine illustrations in this section, they are some of the best in the book in my opinion.

Finally, the section titled “Other Art Works” contains an assortment of illustrations from different projects. There are eight pages of monochrome illustrations for a light novel and the rest of the illustrations are in color.

The book ends with a 7-page interview with Shigenori Soejima, along with the cover illustration, but presented in full. Since all the copyright information accompanies each illustration, there isn’t a need for an index. Instead there is an appendix featuring a collage of line arts from the finished illustrations in the book. In the end, the illustrations are gorgeous. I can completely forgive the shortcomings in the page layouts and just appreciate all the good aspects of this book.