Recollect Original Illustration Book

I think most people are familiar with the Taiwanese artist Capura. L through the artist's elaborately detailed Touhou illustrations. And as beautiful as those illustrations are, it made me really curious to see what kind of art work would be featured in an original collection. Luckily, Comiket 77 gave us the chance to find out exactly what that would be, with the release of Recollect, a collection of Capura. L's original illustrations.

Recollect is a B5 sized, 24-page staple-bound color illustration doujinshi. Covers aren't included in that count, because for once, only the proper pages are numbered. Which is kind of a good thing, since technically, the cover illustration takes up three pages in addition to the cover, appearing in a spread inside as well as the title page.

The art work spans from 2006 through 2009, so it's a pretty selective collection. That, or Capura. L hasn't really done a lot of art work outside of Touhou. And if you take the artist's Pixiv account as a guide, then it seems to be the latter. Interestingly, the older images are really easy to spot, as Capura. L's eye and face style has really changed. I prefer the cute, round-eye look that's in the newer images, like the opening illustration for this post and the cover art.

Three of the original illustrations came from the I.S.W. wallpaper collections that have been released at Comiket over the past couple of years. So if you've been collecting those, you're in for a little more repetition. It's good to see though that Capura. L's original illustrations keep that same magic as the Touhou ones with well-placed glows and sparkles, as well as fitting background arts.

It's a nice collection, but I did expect (and hope) that more of the illustrations would have been newly done. The only new illustrations are the cover and this one. Ideally, Capura. L's next original collection will be more substantial.

• Title: Recollect
• タイトル: Recollect
• Release Dates: 12/31/2009
• Pages: 24
• Buy: Toranoana