Showing posts with label yamashita shunya. Show all posts
Showing posts with label yamashita shunya. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

An Awesome Score!

Hey! Remember  a few weeks back I was raving about the latest art book from japanese illustrator Shunya Yamashita? And I posted up a couple of my favorite shots from said book, including the one of Shoko (above pic)?

So, the other week, me and my friend Jas were walking through our neighborhood comic store, and while I was perusing the latest comics (picking up the newest comic adaptation of Stephen King's THE STAND), Jas laughed out loud and said to me, "Hey, check out this statue of this girl- she looks TOTALLY like the kind of girl you like!"

I walked over and just about did a double take when I saw THIS sitting on the shelf:
It was a sculpture of super-cutie Shoko, the "Pink Negligee" pin-up I'd scanned just a few days earlier! Holy CRAP!
I'd seen various statues modeled after Shunya Yamashita's characters before, but every single one that I'd ever seen was of his Final-Fantasy style warrior women, and it just never crossed my mind that there were others!

I have to say, this is a HELLA well made figure here. Look at the details in her legs, the frilly lace on her gown, heck, even the heels are removable...in fact, they're packaged individually, so I had the strange joy of slipping them on her feet! I paid strict attention to the fact that on the extended leg, the shoe is meant to be dangling off her foot, so I had to hang it just right!
Another thing that is always interesting about statues like this is, the sculptor had to imagine what the backside of these characters looked like. You have to have a pretty good imagination for stuff like this. I remember when they made figures of the Muppet Show characters, It was SOOOOO interesting to see what the sculptor created for the Muppets from the waist down!
Oh, and by the way, the statue of Shoko was priced at $54.00, but the figures were on sale that day, and I was able to pick up the statue for $26.00! Yeah, Whatta Deal! Think I'll display this one above my computer monitor...

Thursday, December 25, 2008

A couple of awesome Christmas Gifts!


Got a couple of terrific gifts from Car this Christmas, both books and both Japanese, to boot! Now, I'm the kind of guy that, when I like something, I'm manic about collecting everything about it the moment it becomes available, so it's always a happy surprise when she picks up stuff I didn't even know existed!

Knowing of my love for that Aoi Miyazaki show, she got me the third and final of the Companion books from NHK’s Taiga Drama ATSUHIME! I hadn't even realized they MADE a third book! Although I haven’t really been all that excited about Atsuhime ever since the Shogun died, It's still the only japanese drama I'm watching right now, so it was pretty cool to get this book- look at that beautiful cover! Lots of great shots of the latter cast and crew, plus the obligatory “out of costume” shots of Miyazaki Aoi, always a draw for me in ANY photo shoot!

Kind of interesting to note that in Atsuhime, there’s a geisha played by actress Natsuki Harada named Okoto who has a fling with Eita’s character Tatewaki (and gives bitrth to his child...yikes!), but she wasn’t featured in either of the first two books. I thought, "Gee, maybe if they made a THIRD book, she’d be in it”. Then when I saw that there WAS a third book, I figured, finally! She MUST be in this one, RIGHT?!…but I was wrong!!!

EDIT: As Vincent-Sama and others have pointed out to me, Natsuki Harada WAS featured in the second book, as well as the character index in the third book! I've GOT to read these books a bit SLOWERRRRRR...I'm missing too much!

Car ALSO got me the latest picture book from my favorite japanese illustrator, SHUNYA YAMASHITA! I’ve long been a fan of Yamashita’s[山下しゅんや], whose art style seems to be a meld of 1950’s Good Girl art and 1970’s Japanese Anime (a unique formula that yields the sexiest, cutest gals you ever laid eyes upon) and the pin-ups featured in this book do NOT disappoint!

Called WILDFLOWER, the book is broken up into chapter sections featuring his all-encompassing work on figures, character design, video, card games, and more, but for me, the highlight was the "unpublished" section of the book, featuring all the sketches of his sexy GIRLS! Man, the artwork here is just unbelievable- I swear there isn’t ANYONE out there who has a style quite like Yamashita’s!

Sorede, I’ve scanned a couple of my favorite pin-ups here for you all to check out! Enjoy~


In the immortal words of Jellyfish in the zany masterpiece Ignorance is Bliss, I say: "I think I've made my point!"