January 20th 2006

• Artist
• ISBN
• Published

• Price
• Dimension

• Arina Tanemura
• 4-08-855106-0
• 04/2004

• ¥ 1800
• A4

When I was first introduced to shoujo manga, I came upon quite a few sites dedicated to Arina Tanemura. Honestly, I did not like her art at the time. I find the characters’ eyes to be way out of proportion and the faces/body parts have too many sharp edge unlike the smooth curve usually found in Yuu Watase and Wataru Yoshizumi's arts. However, after reading her manga over the years, I have grown to Arina Tanemura's style by now and found them quite charming.

This book features arts for Full Moon wo Sagashite, Time Stranger Kyoko, and various others work. There are more than 130 illustrations. Additionally, it also comes with a double-sided pullout poster (Sample #1). Page layouts are mostly single-spread, double-spread, and sometime consisted of several illustrations.

One thing that I do not like about this book is way the illustrations are presented. Instead of having a thumbnail page at the end with comment on each illustration, the comments are placed right beneath the illustrations. This is fine if it is applied to full-page layouts. However, on pages with several illustrations piled together, things tend to look a bit messy.

This is a must-buy even if you have no idea who Arina Tanemura is. With the amount of illustrations you’ll be getting, this book is something that should not be missed.