#wrow i wrote a whole novel huh.

[domesticangel]

Hello! So I am interested in paint bbs and I saw that you used to paint in there and I was hopeing if you can explain a little we’re to start or how to start (how to do a account) because I don’t really know the official place of if it is a official place, I hope you can help me! Sorry for my English

HIIIIII dont apologize for your english its perfect!!!

sooo unfortunately paintbbs and oekaki in general are really falling out of fashion as of the past couple years, if i had to guess mostly due to the fact that its reliant entirely on java, which is also becoming obsolete fast at least in regards to anything not related to programming. I can't speak for people using other operating systems, but at least on my mac, its been probably a year at least since it could properly run any sort of java-based applet before the os updates just outran what java was capable of ☹️ so you may very well have better luck with windows or something but I'm not sure

another main problem though is that because of this, there aren't very many places that host oekaki anymore. bc it wasn't a program that you downloaded to your computer (at least to my knowledge; ive looked for downloads and haven't been able to find any) there wasn't really one specific place you had to go to use paintbbs--generally how it worked was that there would be a board online (usually an offshoot of a forum) that would host the oekaki applets, and you would make an account on one of these boards in order to be able to use the oekaki applets, similar to things like tegaki e. i wish i had some boards i could recommend to you, but the one or two that i kept up with don't exist anymore.....im not sure when oekaki originated, but judging by the fact that i started using it in middle school, it wouldve had to have been in the early 2000s, so a lot of the boards were well over 10-15 years old, and the domain names seemed to start expiring one after another. the most recent board i used was called sutaro sketcher, but trying to go to it now just leaves you with a 404 error.

you can definitely try your hand at just searching for oekaki boards and seeing what comes up (ive tried a couple times, but I'm mostly getting boards with newer applets that I'm not familiar with as opposed to the classic paintbbs, shipainter, oekakibbs, etc. it looks like chickensmoothie is relatively active and at least functioning, though it only offers chibipaint, which i knew of but never familiarized myself with) because its entirely possible i overlooked some, but i myself haven't had much luck. if you do find a board with paintbbs, I'm sure all you'll have to do is register, which should immediately grant you access to the drawing applets! just make sure your java is up to date though, because they get seriously buggy if it’s not. id also recommend screenshotting your progress frequently, because a lot of the times the applets will allow you to use all the functions of it no problem, but will crash or run into issues when you try to upload your finished piece.

in the event that you don't find any boards youre satisfied with, you could always give tegaki e a try! its not exactly the same, but i do find it shares similarities to the ways that shipainter and paintbbs handled color and opacity layering. I'm sorry i couldn't be more helpful!!!!! oekaki was a huge part of my artistic upbringing and it brings back such fond memories, but unfortunately its kinda disappeared 😭

i tried to track down some artists that used it recently, and i believe i found one, so i sent them an ask to see if they knew of and used an active board. if they reply back with one, ill definitely let you know!!!