Oekaki Board is live!
I have managed to successfully install a working oekaki board to my website!
What is an oekaki board?
A long lost messaging board popular in the early 2000’s when everyone was making their own websites!
Oekaki boards originated in Japanese spaces, and oekaki literally means “doodle”, “drawing”, or “scribble”, with the function of the message board revolving around drawing in a browser-based app and submitting your finished piece to the messaging board. Oekaki boards inspired the creation of Paint Chat, a version of oekaki boards that allowed multiple people to draw on the same canvas together, which paved the way for shared-canvas platforms like Magma.com and the now absorbed Aggie.io.
However, with the rise of social media platforms leading to the death of personal websites, and the internet entering the age of HTML5, a lot of older oekaki boards were lost or broken. However, the creators/coders and enthusiasts have adapted the art-centered messaging board to survive, and the only reason its not as popular anymore is because most people do not pay for their own hosting services (which I believe is needed to host your own oekaki board)
So you’d like to use MY oekaki board, eh?
Here’s a few ground rules, subject to change due to human experience:
- No hate speech
- no impersonating others
- no NSFW/nudity
- no spamming
- no users under 18 of age
This oekaki board is not set up for account creation, so we are on a trust system when it comes to who you say you are. I don’t know how to include account creation, but honestly without it, that just means there’s no risk of having passwords leaked.
Speaking of passwords, there IS a function for setting a password to each post you make before submitting that post to the message board that will allow you to go back and edit or delete it. Make sure you pick something you’ll remember but also not easy for others to guess, but don’t use any passwords you’d use for important accounts just to be safe!
HELLO why are there so many tool options???
So the OG programs for oekaki boards were PaintBBS and Shi-Painter.
What’s the difference? LAYERS.
PaintBBS Neo
PaintBBS is the OG OG of oekaki boards, very primitive in function, and originally did NOT have layers.
Paint BBS Neo has a total of 2 layers located at the bottom right: LayerFG & LayerBG
You can mix up your colors and change in a 255-level RBG format.
Opacity works the same with a 255 Alpha level format.
Shi-Painter
Shi-Painter works exactly like PaintBBS Neo, but has the option to create multiple layers, and does not appear to have a limit on how many layers you can make (I went up to 27 layers to test and stopped lol)
The current active layer is visible in the bottom right in the same location as PaintBBS Neo, and upon clicking it pulls up a layer tab with a menu button to add, delete, merge, or change layer properties which is more advanced than available in PaintBBS.
Ok, this is the point where I tell you that I’m primarily an iPad user for artwork, the Procreate App specifically. Each of these drawing tools for the oekaki board have been tested on my iPad, so they should all work in theory. I plan to go back and thoroughly test these with actual effort to create a piece of artwork on my older gen2 iPad Pro (2017) to ensure there’s functionality for most, if not all, iPad users.
The rest of these tool options I have literally never heard of until I installed my oekaki board, and I have done a quick test with each of them to see how they look and work.
Tegaki
This was the first one I quick-tested, and was fairly surprised to see that every tool option beyond PaintBBS and Shi-Painter looks like a full on drawing program!
Right away I noticed that the UI changes between desktop and mobile
It appears to have layers, and there does not appear to be a limit on how many you can create.
(I stopped at 22 layers while quick-testing)
The main thing I noticed was that you have a limited color palette.
At minimum, there are 14 color options, and if you click the arrow button under the right side of the color header bar, it expands up to 38 color options. The limited color palette is not ideal for most artists, but if you want to challenge yourself to limited/specific color palettes, Tegaki would be a fun starting point.
Unfortunately for mobile/iPad users, the canvas gets cut off when zooming in, and I could not figure how to reposition the canvas to fit in the screen to continue drawing, so keep that in mind if you plan to utilize Tegaki
Axnos Paint
Right off the bat, upon selecting Axnos Paint, you’re pummeled by an array of tool boxes and it feels a little overwhelming. You can arrange the boxes however you desire, and actually hide or access them via the Panels box.
The only restriction I have found with Axnos is that you can only have a max of 8 layers.
Overall, testing it with a quick doodle, there’s a lot of drawing potential!
My line art felt a little wobbly however and I am unsure if that was me personally, or if there is some sort of stabilizer in the app, but it definitely looks and feels like a solid drawing program
LitaChix
The L in LitaChix is normally lowercase but for legibility reasons, I am capitalizing it because I had to copy-paste it into Clip Studio Paint to change the font to figure out if it was a lowercase L or uppercase i lol
ANYWAY, LitaChix is another robust-looking drawing program with full color range and possible no layer limits (I stopped at 42 layers doing a quick-test) and the full range of blend modes.
I really liked the feel of this drawing tool. Without much change in brush settings, I really liked how the brush looked for my preferred line art softness, but there was one big issue that I’m not sure is a mobile issue or a brush setting issue
The problem was, every time I touched my Apple Pencil to the canvas to make a line, it’d make a dot at the contact point before the pen pressure kicked in like normal, which really messed with the overall usage for me. Again though, this was a quick-test and I’m unsure if I was the issue, the iPad/Apple Pencil was the issue, or if it was a brush setting issue I did not see in the settings in LitaChix.
Klecks
The last drawing tool you can choose in the oekaki board is Klecks. It has full color range and feels like a robust drawing option. The only real limit is that you have a max of 14 layers available, but they have the full range of blend modes available
One of the neatest things about this one is the extra tools, like vanishing point, noise, grid, blur, tilt shift and distort.
The brush settings felt pretty good right upon the program loading.
Overall I think that if you want the nostalgic experience of early 2000’s internet experience, PaintBBS Neo or Shi-Painter is the go-to (Shi-Painter if you need more than 2 layers).
If you want the best option for a full-on drawing program, I think Klecks would be my top pick.
I’ll eventually go back into each drawing tool option to put more effort into creating a finished doodle to thoroughly test them.
If I find my opinions change afterward, I’ll come back with updates to this post!
And with that, GO FORTH AND DOODLE