Book Review: 背景画集 草薙
草薙 (Kusanagi) is a Japanese artist group that creates background art for animation and computer games. This is their first portfolio art book.
Right at the start is a short background story of how 草薙 (Kusanagi) was started, written in Japanese. The rest of the books are full coloured illustrations coming from the following titles:
- 鋼の錬金術師 (Fullmetal Alchemist), the movie and series
- おねがい☆ティーチャ (Onegai Teacher)
- 神秘の世界エルハザード (El-Hazard)
- フタコイ オルタナティブ (Futakoi Alternative)
- ノエイン もうひとりの君へ (Noein)
- サクラ大戦 (Sakura Taisen)
- アバタール・チューナー (Digital Devil Saga)
- アークザラッド (Arc The Lad)
- フロントミッション (Front Mission Online)
- Bokura No Kazoku
- みんなのGOLF (Everybody's Golf)
- Ganbare Goemon
- Quiz Magic Academy 2
- Suteradeus
- ファイナルファンタジーIX (Final Fantasy IX)
- ファイナルファンタジーX (Final Fantasy X)
- ファイナルファンタジーXII (Final Fantasy XII)
- Codename FS
All are captioned, in Japanese, but the art speaks for itself. These are mainly background paintings for animation and computer games. For game art, they are actually the plane characters walk on. If you've watched or played any, most of the images will be nostalgic.
The book contains much more art for animation than for the games. There are bits of everything, from rural landscapes, cityscapes and fantasy settings. There is nothing on character design.
Some of the art shown here are reused in the later volumes of the book, but luckily not too much.
This book is recommended to background or video game artists.
This book is available at:
Amazon Japan | YesAsia USA
If you buy from any links on the blog, I get a little commission that helps me get more art books to feature.
Here's the Amazon Japan buying guide for your reference.
Comments
Great to see background
Great to see background artists releasing books like this. I find that background art is often neglected in animation and only the character animators and designers given the spotlight.
My two favorite bg artists are Kazuo Oga of Ghibli fame and Hiromasa Ogura (Patlabor, Ghost in the shell, Jin-roh..). Both do extremely beautiful background art and deserve to be named.
I wonder how these artists
I wonder how these artists draw a ton of that stuff for each scenes in an anime or a game cinematics etc.
Each one of those would take me days b/c I keep making mistakes.
They're done by oil paint, right?
dokebi - I'm not sure what
In reply to I wonder how these artists by dokebi (not verified)
dokebi -
I'm not sure what they use. Probably oil painting.