Hino Matsuri Illustrations Vampire Knight

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Hino Matsuri, author and illustrator of the popular girl’s manga Vampire Knight, released her first art book on July 5th called Hino Matsuri Illustrations Vampire Knight. Like with most manga illustrations, many of the art works were only in issues of LaLa magazine and usually covered in text.

This collection is 94 pages and A4-size, although width-wise, it is a little wider than your average art book. Hino Matsuri Illustrations Vampire Knight packs in illustrations with many spreads and several full page illustrations. Small illustrations, like the end of chapter ones on the manga volumes, share a page.

Most of the illustrations are of the main trio: Zero, Yuki and Kaname. But even with in that, there are a lot of pairing pictures, mostly Zero x Yuki or Kaname x Yuki. Those tend to be some of the best ones though, as Hino Matsuri always has a really “dramatic” take on her couples illustrations.

Even still, there are more side-character illustrations than one might expect. It’s really quite a complete collection of published art work for Vampire Knight so far.

Like with most manga-based art books, the print quality is very high. Illustrations made with traditional media instead of digitally really print well in art books. Kiyo Kyujyo Illustrations Trinity Blood ~Rubor~, D. Gray-man Illustrations NOCHE, To Love-Ru Illustrations Love Color are all great examples of the high quality results of traditional media.

I don’t know if it’s just my copy, but several of the pages are stuck together. It looks like it seeped from the spine of the book. It’s accidental, as I can easily pull them apart, but not without some damage to the color on the pages. You can see it in some images above; that’s as far apart as those pages go.

The book has all the manga covers up to the most recently released volume 12. I don’t buy LaLa magazines, so there are a lot of smaller, non-cover illustrations that ran in the magazine I’d never seen before.

As there’s no text anywhere on the illustration pages, all of Hino Matsuri’s comments are in the index, along with a three page narrative of how she illustrated the cover illustration (and fold-out poster inside). The cover/fold-out poster is the only new illustration for the book. Aside from the glue issue, Hino Matsuri Illustrations Vampire Knight is good value for money, priced at an affordable ￥1,890. Definitely a must-have art book for any Vampire Knight fan!