Name: Zero - Illust. Collection of Zero no Tsukaima
Illustrator: Eiji Usatsuka
Publisher: Media Factory
Format: Paperback
Price: 1809 yen
Actually, to tell the truth, what I really wanted to get was the Shakugan no Shana artbook, but they didn't have it so I settled for Zero no Tsukaima. =\ XD Anyways moving on to the review, but first some background info.
Eiji Usatsuka is an artist best known for illustrating the romantic comedy harem light novel series, Zero no Tsukaima. Other than that he also drew for several eroge. This book contains said ZnT illustrations.
The dust cover is pretty good. Louise is standing on a green field with a really blue sky over her, holding a wand and looking at the 'camera'. The pages themselves are nice, shiny, heavy, and good quality. They also smell really good. Like most other artbooks, Zero has a foldout page at the very beginning:
Front Side:
Back Side:
Cute. Anyways, Zero is divided into five sections: Louise, Characters, Monochrome, Tabitha, and Other Illust. There are 148 pages in all. Let's check out the Louise section first, 'cause it's, well, the first section.
The Louise section contains primarily Louise, obviously (there's some Saito and Siesta in there too, though.). Some of the illustrations come from the novels, some from the DVDs, some seemingly unique to the artbook. There are some details about Louise that I never noticed before, actually...like, how her legs fatten out a bit above her stockings (yes yes I know this always happens but I never noticed it actually drawn before <<;; )...actually I found myself focusing on her legs throughout the whole entire section, which is weird because I usually never pay attention to legs in anime artbooks. In the Louise section, Louise never has a tsundere expression on - she's mostly either happy, flustered, serious, calm, or seductive (can't describe her expression in those pages where she's sprawled out on beds in negligee.) The artwork is more or less done well. The image quality is smooth and clear, so I don't know why it turns out so grainy in the scans...oh well...here are some pics from that section.
Second section, characters! Here you have groupshots. In some pics, the art is shrunk, but there are enough big pics to make up for that, I think. Most of these look like they're from promotional posters. Something I noticed is that there are very few backgrounds - most pics are against plain white, or random dots. I dunno, but I like backgrounds in my artbooks so that's a mark down for me. Also, most of the pics in this section blended into an indistinguishable mass...they look pretty similar to each other...
Third section, monochrome. This is a pretty boring section to be honest. Just the illustrations from the light novels, and you can find all of them on Baka-Tsuki. This book has all of them up to the one with Saito grabbing the big-breasted elf girl's breasts. The monochrome drawings are scaled down so that they can fit four per page.
Fourth section, Adventures of Tabitha. I don't know exactly what adventures Tabitha did, but I really like this section. Too bad it's so short. It's pretty much all of Tabitha, Kirche, some blue-haired queen person, and Sylphid, Tabitha's dragon familiar. The drawings are vivid and colorful, and depict Tabitha in a variety of situations, like battling against some large grey vaguely menacing monster, riding on Sylphid, gambling, and looking cool.
Last section, Other Illust. The very first thing you see is Louise sitting on Saito holding a whip. Why they didn't just put that picture in the Louise section, I have no idea. In the next page, you see an original character - a skimpily dressed dark-skinned devil girl. On the page after that, you see random sketches of some drawings from earlier on in the art book. That's it for Other Illust. After that there's a short story in Japanese and an explanation of each picture in the artbook.
Overall, this artbook is okay. It's definitely not the best artbook in the world, but it's not horrible, and any Zero no Tsukaima fan would probably love to have this in their collection. However, only Zero no Tsukaima fans need apply, in my opinion. These drawings probably won't interest non-fans, because the art doesn't quite stand out enough to stand on its own.
Anyways yeah 8/10 if you're a fan, 6/10 if you're not.
Logged
