Masaki Asai (Hatsune Miku illustrator)
Masaki Asai (born January 7, 1973), commonly known as "Masaki Apsy" , is a Japanese figure prototype specialist. He was born in Osaka Prefecture and is the head of F-Face (plastic) , a major Wonder Festival hobbyist retailer. He specializes in selling his own designs at an affordable price, with many figures being sold for less than 7,000 yen or given away as free bonuses.
Career
Asai introduced a fully mobile garage kit using a colored resin cast of the "Phantasy Star Online" character REDRIA at an event in 2006 and it proved immediately popular for its design, colors, and low cost.
He currently sends various fully poseable figurines to many amateur creators. The works range from robots to female figurines to deformed versions of popular characters. Moreover, with the development of a unique versatile ball joint called Parabellum b3, interest in his works continues to grow.
He is one of the most active in the Japanese modeling industry, despite a shortage of young prototyping specialists, and he is very popular due to his friendly personality. For example, if there are problems with a figure, such as reassembly, repairing broken parts, or repainting, he often takes care of them on-site at events such as the Wonder Festival.
In addition to maintaining his own blog, he is very active on Twitter. When he's not tweeting about restaurants he's eaten at, he's always ready to help hobby modelers with their problems by providing detailed instructions.
Asai also works as a part-time professor at Osaka University of the Arts, where he teaches character modeling courses.
Masaki and Hatsune Miku
In one of her first blog posts in 2009, Asai showcased a modified model featuring the figma figure of Hatsune Miku. Her outfit was hand-painted silver, and this sparked her fascination with creating modified Hatsune Miku models for production.
Crypton's future media developers noticed her attention to detail and asked her to design the packaging for their upcoming Hatsune Miku Append software. Her latest artwork shows Miku with her eyes closed and facing upwards while her hair waves vibrantly behind her. It was the first official artwork to show Miku without her signature boots.
Her futuristic creations generated a huge buzz and inspired many fans to create hundreds of artworks using the Hatsune Miku Append outfit. Within days of the software's release, it was trending on Twitter. Masaki was thrilled with the overwhelming fan support.
Other works
Asai was the model for a new character in Kazuhiko Shimamoto's popular 1994 manga Gareki no Shou .
He served as a prototype for Rei Ayanami and Asuka Shikinami Langley in the culture-defining series Neon Genesis Evangelion (2009). These figures were released as bonus items for those who purchased the limited edition Neon Genesis Evangelion comics.
He has also released other bonus figures for series such as Koiwai Yotsuba , and Buster Machine , and in 2019, collaborated with huke (designer of Black Rock Shooter ) to release chitocerium (チトセリウム) character VI-carbon adamas. None
Reviews of the figure have been overwhelmingly positive, with many fans stating that the box set is stunning in design, so much so that it was worth the purchase alone. Others note that the figure is incredibly detailed, with so many parts that it's almost impossible to believe it was so cheap compared to similarly designed models.
In addition to his primary focus on garage kit figures, Asai has continued to pursue his passion for illustration. He is one of the designers of figma and has been directly involved in over a dozen different figures, many of which have become bestsellers for the company.
Asai was one of the designers of the popular anime series, Gundam 00 None Gravity Stun None Expelled from Heaven , and Captain Earth He participated in the original mecha design for the successful Super Robot Wars X game released in 2018 for the PS4 and PSVita and in 2020 for Steam and Nintendo Switch.
