PENCIL 10th Anniversary Pamphlet

Reading Time: 3 minutes

One of the many Toranoana gallery exhibitions from last year was an anniversary celebration of art by PENCIL, which has under its wing artists like Tetsuya Ohno, Kannagi Rei, Tanihara Natsuki, and Shinonome Kazuhiko. The PENCIL 10th Anniversary Pamphlet conveniently brings together the illustrations of these artists that were exhibited, just in case you couldn’t make it to the event.

Like other exhibition books I’ve reviewed, PENCIL 10th Anniversary Pamphlet can hardly be considered a pamphlet with 72 full-color pages and a giant A3-sized format. Unlike previous exhibition books, the majority of the illustrations fill the A3-sized pages, so it feels like a poster collection. The book opens identically from either side (no indexes or contents pages), so it doesn’t feel like there is a front or a back, with one cover illustrated by Kannagi Rei and the other by Tetsuya Ohno.

When you flip through the book from the Tetsuya Ohno side, you start out with the illustrations by Tetsuya Ohno. The games featured for this side are Prism Magical ~Prism Generations!~ and Prism Ark. But the Prism Magical side isn’t exclusively Tetsuya Ohno. Tanihara Natsuki is involved in at least half of the illustrations from the series with both joint and solo works. As a result, there are many art works from Prism Magical that weren’t in the recently reviewed Tetsuya Ohno Illustrations PRISM.

In the center of the book is art work by Shinonome Kazuhiko. Kazuhiko’s girls are amazingly voluptuous, but also believably proportioned. His section features girls from the games Aneimo (あねいも). Shinonome Kazuhiko’s section runs from pages 32 through 48.

Kannagi Rei’s art work finishes up the remainder of PENCIL 10th Anniversary Pamphlet from pages 49 through 70. None of the illustrations are spreads due to the large size of the book, so you really do get to see a lot of art works in this collection. The girls in Kannagi Rei’s section are from the Twinkle Crusaders (ティンクル☆くるせいだーす) series of games along with a couple of illustrations from the older game Princess Witches (プリンセスうぃっちぃず ).

PENCIL 10th Anniversary Pamphlet is an excellent collection, with a great variety of art from well-known artists. I would definitely recommend it!