Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon Illustrations Vol IV

An interesting thing to note along with the development of Naoko Takeuchi’s art style, is how she began to incorporate ‘real life’ elements into her artwork. The border for an image at the front of the book looks like antiqued gold leaves with pearls printed and cut out, then stuck together to form a sort of decoupage border… on another image Takeuchi uses photos of actual lychee fruit, water melon, jack fruit and other various fruits as part of the image itself. The effect is nice, but not many of the images exhibit this use of real life images.
Again many of the images in this book have been re-produced as posters and other forms of merchandising, the pull out posters themselves re-produced into larger versions. Also again, not many images of the evil characters. Images are either full page or double page spreads; there are some with more than 1 image on them, but not many. The cover scan below doesn’t show it very well, but the lettering is done in an embossed silver.

Considering the cover price of this book, you get a good selection of images presented in a very nice format. It’s a shame that this book has been long out of print; these days you may end up paying quite a bit for the Japanese edition. Please note, there is a licensed Chinese version of this artbook but it is in softcover. There is also a “hardback” version floating around on eBay thats being sold rather cheaply. The quality of artwork is not good and these books are probably bootlegs.

A must for fans of the artist and series

p.s. if you would like translations of the notes in this book, check out Manga Style’s translations.