Pixiv is a Japanese online community mainly for artists, similar to what deviantart is for most English speaking artists. Pixiv’s official aim is to provide a place for artists to exhibit their illustrations and get feedback via a rating system and user comments. Unfortunately, the site is only available in Japanese but parts of it can be made into English with the assistance of Grease monkey scripts. I personally recommend Pixiv Translation Plus as it has many of the main features of the others but rehashed into one addon. It doesn’t really help much when searching but it is possible to jump from one artist to the next in a pseudo youtube-like fashion thanks to artist bookmarks and tagging. The site has even sparked its’ own artbook compilation of the best rated images (pictured right).
In one of my previous posts I had mentioned the artist Redjuice, which in addition to knowing the art from a CD Cover.. I actually was able to see some of his other works through Pixiv, and even found his main website.
Yeah yeah, Thats’ all great.. but how do we register if the site is in Japanese?
Well, the good news is.. once you have an account you shouldn’t have to recreate a new one unless it was misused. There are various guides on the internet with basic translations but there is one in particular that I liked. Sairin from lc-theory.net compiled a nice little screenshot(pictured left) and even did some work on a translation script.
Once you have your account, you should be good to start browsing for artists. Some starter ones are;
RedJuice
Mappinikki
Masa (?)
Udon-Ya (*) (Some of it NSFW)
Leave a Reply