Sugina Miki Work Collection Nuregarasu

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Sugina Miki Work Collection Nuregarasu has illustrations from all the Innocent Grey games made since 2005. I found the “work collection” part of the title worrisome and thought there would be excessive amounts of re-printed game CGs. Luckily, the book focuses on the high-quality promotional art works used for magazines. It also includes several pages of Sugina Miki’s original illustrations.

The cover art is new and the alternate version inside the book gives the impression of being more clothed. The illustration above with the girl laying across a desk is also new, along with the last illustration in the section titled “Original.” Even if there aren’t a lot of book exclusive art works, most of this was completely new to me. I’ve really been limited to the very small selection of Innocent Grey art works that are online.

The first section of this 130-page hardcover art book is Cartagra, with plenty of illustrations of the yagasuri clad heroine, Kohzuki Kazuna. These beautiful illustrations include several two-page spreads printed without overlap, so it cuts into the image in some cases. For the most part, the spreads contain a lot of scenery. In a few pictures the binding cuts into the character image. The Cartagra illustrations are very surreal and atmospheric, or just full of nature. This section covers pages 8 through 41.

The following section is slightly shorter and features illustrations from PP – Pianissimo. Most of the illustrations are quite dark in this section. Somehow, I managed to take pictures of the brightly colored ones so you’re not really getting the best selection sample. Anyhow, this section is 20 pages in length, and features a few pages of tiled images drawn for telecards.

The next section, Nagomibako, is also a short one and features some of the Cartagra characters. It was one-part “after story” and one-part alternate universe. This section is only 8 pages long.

Kara no Shoujo is next. It’s the visual novel I’m most familiar with from Innocent Grey. The girl breaking from the shell was an illustration I’d seen many times before I knew about Sugina Miki and everything else.

The last game featured is the most recent Innocent Grey production, Kuroukashisu Nanatsuki no Nie. I’ve always thought the blonde girl looks a lot like Type-Moon’s Arcueid Brunestud‎.

The final section includes original works by Sugina Miki. Most of the pictures fit to half a page, which isn’t great. It’s interesting to see that most of his free work is cheerful and brightly colored.

Expect for this. This is one of the other new illustrations for the art book.

Oh no! Printing error! And on her face! It sucks when that happens. I want to believe I’m not the only one this happened to.

The remainder of the book features a short walk-through of the process for the cover illustration, a 6-page interview with Sugina Miki, and the index is all on one page with no thumbnails. Before that is 4-page full color hentai comic, which hardly seemed worth it. This is why the rating bumped up to 18+ at the last minute, so you can’t buy it from Amazon Japan if you’re not in Japan. There was nothing else in the entire book to warrant that rating. Still, I do think it was worth the little extra effort to get!