365 Reasons to Love

Title: 100 Masters of Bishojo Painting

Artist(s)/Creator(s): Various.

Pages: 216.

Release Date: March 1, 2010.

Retail Price: 2380yen; 31.00USD

Price I bought it for: $31.00

Place I bought it from: Amazon.com

Those phenomenally popular Japanese anime girls big-eyed beauties with winsome expressions and impossibly flexible bodies are called bishojo, Japanese for beautiful girls. In this eye-popping new book from BNN, you ll find 500 versions of the bishojo gals digitally illustrated by 100 Japanese masters.

The cover is designed by one of the genre’s most celebrated artists, Range Murata, and featured artists include professional illustrators who create covers for the young adult genre called light novel in Japan and who design characters for games and animations, as well as stand-out amateur artists who show their works on pixiv
(the best-known user-generated illustration website in Japan) or in doujinshi (independently published comics).

This eminently useful book also includes information to serve as a directory to these talented Japanese artists and the production environment they specialize in. Using a password and ID in the book, readers can download very cool desktop wallpapers.- Amazon.

Inside cover is very simple. Book is B5 format.

Book begins with a preface in japanese and english introduction. Followed by Three 2-page spread by VOFAN, toi8, and Shimeko as a special feature.

A list of all the artists that are featured in this artbook.

Yo Asami.

The format of this book is very similar to the artbook “Girl, Illustrated” where artists get two pages of the book, which usually contains one full page, a couple of smaller illustrations and a bit of information about them at the top. It includes websites, profile, and a short message.

Eiji Usatsuka.

Shiho ENTA.

Yay, Kazuaki! =]

Yu Kamiya.

Kuroyuki.

Even our famous KEI!

Zain.

Shimeko, one of the special featured artists. Very ephemeral drawings.

toi8, another one of the special featured artists.

Nardack. I really love the vibrant colors and detailed illustrations.

Aoi Nishimata, a very prominent artist.

Kaori Minakami. I really want her artbook. =.=

Our famous Range Murata who did the cover of this artbook. Her work is very well accepted by fans and artists alike. A lot of people cite her and her work as their inspiration.

MorinoMao; very colorful illustrations.

And of course, Redjuice. =]

At the end of the book is a couple of pages of “Creator’s Data.” Sex, Birthday, Bloodtype, etc.

Overall a very good book to have and $30 is a reasonable price for a book of this quality. A word of warning is that there is some overlap with the “Girl, Illustrated” book, because some artists are featured in both books, and often this means that illustrations are repeated. Nevertheless, it’s still a very good book. If I had to chose between this and the other one, I’d chose the this book since it features more well-known artists, more illustrations (since the other one had 3 case stories) and because of the awesome cover. =]