Aoi Nishimata Illustrations VIVID

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Aoi Nishimata Illustrations VIVID is aptly titled, as the first impression I had of the book was that it was marvelously colorful, with its decorated characters ranging from school girls to princesses to angels! As the first commercial illustration collection from Aoi Nishimata, VIVID does an excellent job of showcasing her work over the years without focusing too much on any one time period. Outstanding art works from all years were included, going as far back as the year 2000.

The book is hardcover, A4-sized, and 144 pages. The binding is very tight, and as a result it suffers from cutting into the spread illustrations. The illustrations are printed with no overlap, so you’ll miss out on the center of each illustration. Both of Aoi Nishimata’s doujinshi art books included overlap for spread illustrations, so it makes the product design of VIVID seem like a step backwards.

The book starts with a long, double-sided 4-panel poster, with one side featuring a new original illustration and the other displaying a 2009 pillow cover illustration. The title page of Aoi Nishimata Illustrations VIVID is new, along with the cover work (and under cover cat illustrations). There is also a color variation on the cover inside the art book.

The book is organized in a whimsical manner, with the section divides being titled Colorful, Rouge, Cerulean, Scarlet, and Peach. As you might guess, the illustrations are divided by their color scheme, making it quite enjoyable to leaf through. The Colorful section is the first in the book and runs from pages 5 through 26 including several group illustrations and spreads from Judgement Chime, Shuffle!, Final Approach and others.

Older art works were often presented as photos as a page. It happened most noticeably when the illustration style was significantly different (and really more amateur) than what Aoi Nishimata does today. I really liked that presenation because I didn’t think they should be using full pages on old illustrations and also because older art work for an artist is kind of like a glimpse into the past, like photos. The images above were all from the section Rouge and you can see even the page backgrounds were color-themed.

I think the Cerulean section pulls off its color theme the best out of all the sections, though only at the beginning. Aoi Nishimata really had several illustrations that were either blue themed or blue over-toned and it really just stands out. The Cerulean theme starts to fade out towards the end of the section, where pictures start to become more green or just pale. VIVID also has several illustrations that are color variants. But she really does a good job with uniquely coloring her illustrations, so it hardly feels repetitive.

The three illustrations above were all from the Scarlet section, and aside from the first one, they hardly follow the theme. For the most part, the works have a touch of red, brown, or orange in them, but out of all the sections this one feels the least coordinated. Not that this detracts from the illustrations at all!

The final section is dubbed Peach but the majority of illustrations are more along what I would actually call ‘pink.’ This section is filled with girly, frilly illustrations–a number of which are from Lovely Idol, whose girls sported pink gear most of the time. The index includes Nishimata’s comments on nearly every work along with source information. The book ends with a message from the artist. As Aoi Nishimata Illustrations VIVID covers a long period of time, there is some overlap between this book and Aoi Nishimata’s two doujinshi collections. But for the most part, VIVID included newer works and even more finished versions of illustrations that were in the previous books, so it was definitely worth the wait, and worth getting!