Oekaki

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PBBS redirects here, for PBBs, see Polybrominated biphenyls

For Oekaki number puzzles, see Nonograms.

Oekaki (お絵描き) is the Japanese term to describe the act of drawing, meaning "painter". On the Internet, an Oekaki is a message board system that revolves around computer art created by a local art program. Oekaki artists often post their art to other websites, such as personal pages or free gallery websites, in addition to the original board.

The Oekaki interface is a Java applet. It is simple to use, yet offers enough features to create professional-looking images. The resulting picture is usually in dimensions of a few hundred pixels wide/long. The two most popular applets are OekakiBBS and PaintBBS. There are several other applets, but the two described below are the most commonly used on English boards. Artists can use these applets with the computer mouse, a graphics tablet, or a touch screen.

If the BBS and the program applet are both equipped for it, the artist can choose to use an animation feature which allows the BBS users to watch a stroke-by-stroke animation of the image being drawn. Some Oekaki boards also have a Continue feature, which allows the artist to save the image to the board and continue work on it later. Some implementations of Continue retain image layers only when an image is saved as an animation.

Oekaki is extremely popular among the anime Internet subculture, because it enables a community gathering to share fanart and offer critiques and compliments. It also serves as a tool to "flesh out" original characters, especially roleplaying characters.

There are a remarkable number of Oekaki boards, Oekaki Central being one of the largest. People can create their own Oekaki board at sites such as OekakiBBS.com, though that site is often hard to use for non-Japanese-speakers because much of it is in Japanese or poorly translated English.

1 Oekaki applets
2 References
3 See Also
4 External links

[edit] Oekaki applets

OekakiBBS was developed by "Poo" of OekakiBBS. It was the original Oekaki applet and has smaller palettes and fewer screentones. It includes more productive color blending, multiple layer support, masks, and animation saving. Unfortunately this applet is becoming outdated, as it is only compatible with Microsoft's Java Virtual Machine, and not Sun's.

PaintBBS, is a simple applet created by Shi-chan, which utilises two layers and a mask system. It has many different palettes that can be used for a variety of different effects. As of version 2.04, the program detects whether the user's computer is set to Japanese or English and displays the text on the tool button accordingly.

Shi-Painter and Shi-Painter Pro, Shi-chan's latest applets, are becoming more popular but they have yet to become common on English Oekaki boards due to outdated BBS software.

There are other oekaki applets, such as PictureBBS and BBSPainter, but they are far less common. Lascaux Sketch, the featured applet on 2draw is not publicly distributed but is perhaps the most powerful Oekaki applet around.

Oekaki Poteto was an important oekaki script but its development has been stopped. NineChime Software's Wacintaki poteto now succeeds it as the dominant BBS.

[edit] References

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