I made a post last week highlighting that Mediaworks had just released a sequel artbook to Guren called Kaen. Well, I received said artbook a couple of days ago and now have my impressions of it.

Noizi Ito’s new artbook, Kaen, is much like her first one, in build and layout. The book itself is hardcover and is wrapped in the same material that Guren was (though, I don’t know what you call that kind of paper, haha.) The lettering, as you can see, is still in gold. + 1 presentation points. They decided to forego the black background with purple this time around, but it still feels very much like Guren. Not that that is a bad thing, though. I was very much in love with her past artbook.

The first section of the book is devoted to Shakugan no Shana, much like the first book was. All of the art featured in the book was produced within the last 2 years, with one or two exceptions being produced in 2004. In fact, one of the pictures was produced within this month. Since I’m not really a big Shana fan, most of the art in this book was new to me, which made it really nice. I’m sure Shana who don’t already have the various artwork in this Shana section

The next section is called Different Sect. It’s devoted to artwork produced to for other people like Melonbooks. If you’ve ever seen those two To Heart 2 pictures, like the one this figure is based on, you know what I’m talking about. Also, the picture that Noizi Ito produced for the Tsukiyomi -MOON PHASE- opening (or was it one of the endings? I really don’t know, I only read the manga, haha.)

The section after that is called Creation. This is where all of her doujin works are put. This section was my least favorite. Not because the art in the section was bad or anything, it’s really just as good as the other sections, it’s just that I already collected a fair number of her doujin books. I had basically seen over half of the work put into the pages. People who don’t get her doujin artbooks from Comiket will be quite pleased with the section, though.

The final section is some kind of… thing. Ok, I have no idea what it is since it’s all in Japanese >_<;; Umm, it might be interesting to those who can read it, haha… That’s basically it for this artbook. I’d recommend it for any fan of Ito Noizi.

Amazon link: Here