Kiwameru! Kyara Sakuga (Character Drawing) (KITORA)

The neon glossy colors on the dust jacket & overall flaps are really creatively designed and beautiful. There's a little drawing studies workbook of selected drawings included as well. The price is quite good vs other drawing instructional books I've come across. I wish I knew how to read Japanese but I'll have to just practice studies from this book for now. The dust jacket is a cool glossy design. The drawings are beautiful to learn from. I wish there was an English translation for this. The drawings inside have a cool tone to them as well.

This has a nice variety of poses and the sense of movement and expression here is pretty fluid. But otherwise, it feels pretty typical for a HTD? There's male and female characters on the cover, so I expected the book to be more general, but it's another book that not only focuses on drawing female characters, but often with a fanservice-y or kinda overtly sensual (and sometimes) racy angle. Although I don't mind that, I wish the distributor and author would have labeled and advertised it as such to avoid confusion. The summary also mentions "How do you design an original character," but I don't feel this aspect is explored very strongly or especially well, particularly in comparison to some of the slightly older books. Even the "exploring personality" angle comes down to a bit of specific personality traits/subtypes of female characters, and not great advice for expressing characters as a whole. Overall, it's not hard to follow and not bad for a first time book as a primary reference, but not as what it fully advertises or as broad in comparison to even other books available with CDJ.