Shunya Yamashita - One Voice Art Book

Reading Time: 4 minutes

One Voice is the third art book by Shunya Yamashita, on whose designs many figures have been created. Outside of that genre I don’t see a lot of his work nowadays, aside from the occasional light novel illustration or “how-to” art cover. Still, Shunya Yamashita is a renowned artist with an instantly recognizable style that just leaves you wanting more.

One Voice Shunya Yamashita Works is an A4-sized art book and 128 pages. The book is softcover, and the slip cover illustration is repeated on the inside as the first picture in the book.

The book begins with a surprising 40 pages of unpublished works, which includes both finished illustrations and line arts. About 15 pages into that section is a mixture of small black and white illustrations, alongside partially colored works. The rest are full illustrations.

I was also surprised to see that the spreads in this art book are printed as separate pages, with a large white margin in the center dividing the illustration in half. None of the illustration is cut off, or hidden by the book’s binding.

Above are more of the unpublished works from the beginning of the art book. The unpublished works section ends with a short, two page walk-through of how Shunya Yamashita colors and illustrates.

The next section, titled “Original Works for FIGURE,” is about 30 pages. All the illustrations in this section were either used to design a figure, or used as an accompaniment for the figure. Nida Schuetlich, a character often illustrated by Shunya Yamashita, has about eight pages in this section. He also did designs for a series of X-Men figures which are also included over 6 pages, featuring Rogue, Scarlet Witch, Psylocke, Black Widow, and Phoenix.

A couple of other notable figure illustrations were the ones for Ryomou Shimei from Ikki Tousen, and Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Both had unique costumes for their figure designs.

The next 20 pages feature illustrations from video games, under the heading “Original Works for Video Games.” About five of those pages feature characters from Valkyrie Profile 2, which are shared with four illustrations per page. The rest of this section looks like the standard Shunya Yamashita fare, with plenty of girls in armor.

The last color section is titled “Original Works for Books & The Other” and includes a few copyright works. Six of the illustrations are HOBINO cover girls, which is a freely distributed magazine, so you’d probably have missed these outside of Japan. There’s also a Queen’s Blade Echidna illustration along with a spread featuring Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann’s Yoko. This last section is 16 pages.

The book ends with 5 pages of monochrome works that were done for Dai Shogun. Shunya Yamashita’s comments are included in the illustration index along with the original publication information. One Voice is a pretty standard art book from Shunya Yamashita, but if you liked the previous ones, then you’re sure to enjoy this one as well.