Chiba Sadoru - SENCHA Illustration Book 5

Title: SENCHA Illustration Book 5
タイトル: SENCHA Illustration Book 5
Release Date: 08/15/2010
Pages: 24 (including covers)

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Released for Comiket 78, SENCHA Illustration Book 5 is Chiba Sadoru’s fifth illustration volume, but his first done in all color. Previous volumes contained only four to six pages of color art work, with the rest in black and white, but SENCHA Illustration Book 5 is 24 pages of color art works in a B5-sized collection.

I wouldn’t guess that Chiba Sadoru’s art work is all that familiar, but he did have an illustration in last year’s Moeru Japanese Sword Girls and has another in this year’s Moeru Classic Heroine Collection, featuring illustrations of literary heroines by a variety of artists. Commercially, he’s also done the art work for a few light novels, with the most recent being Royal☆Little Star.

The first half of SENCHA Illustration Book 5 features the school girl characters pictured above, illustrated for Gangan Online. The angel versions of the two girls were done for Galge.com as original wallpapers and were the preview images that made me buy this doujinshi!

The illustrations in the second half of the book have a much different feel to them, with a less painted coloring style and more simplified, yet less sketchy line art. If I was just going on the illustrations in the back, I probably wouldn’t have bought this. But luckily that was Chiba Sadoru’s style circa 2007, as the art work is all dated in this collection. For me, he’s definitely an artist to move forward with instead of collecting older SENCHA volumes.