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Posted to Dreamwidth on 3 November 2024, backdated to 1 February 2021. Originally posted on Wordpress.
For those of you who don't know (which is probably everyone reading this blog post), an oekaki is a browser-based drawing application. You draw directly on the website and post your images to an imageboard, where other people could comment on them. I remember some oekakis (perhaps all?) recorded all the brushstrokes you made, so you could play back the recording like a speedpainting and see how someone drew their pieces.
I spent a lot of time on oekaki boards in 2006 & 2007, then started growing out of it in 2008. The very last image I drew on an oekaki was actually in 2010. By that time, I'd primarily switched to drawing in GIMP, and the main oekaki board I used, Neoartists.org, was fairly dead. There's very little evidence of the website ever existing on the internet nowadays.
All of my artwork was posted to Deviantart from early 2007 to mid-2016. I actually found out about Deviantart through Neopets, and ended up friends with the same people on both websites. I don't think any of them have actually been on either website since 2012.
I genuinely haven't been able to find most of the people I used to talk to on Deviantart, or Neopets, or any oekaki board. Either they've distanced themselves from their old usernames and teenage/young adult social media accounts (which is understandable, as I did the same thing) or they've flat-out stopped using any kind of social media entirely.
Wherever those people are, I hope they're doing well.
For those of you who don't know (which is probably everyone reading this blog post), an oekaki is a browser-based drawing application. You draw directly on the website and post your images to an imageboard, where other people could comment on them. I remember some oekakis (perhaps all?) recorded all the brushstrokes you made, so you could play back the recording like a speedpainting and see how someone drew their pieces.
I spent a lot of time on oekaki boards in 2006 & 2007, then started growing out of it in 2008. The very last image I drew on an oekaki was actually in 2010. By that time, I'd primarily switched to drawing in GIMP, and the main oekaki board I used, Neoartists.org, was fairly dead. There's very little evidence of the website ever existing on the internet nowadays.
All of my artwork was posted to Deviantart from early 2007 to mid-2016. I actually found out about Deviantart through Neopets, and ended up friends with the same people on both websites. I don't think any of them have actually been on either website since 2012.
I genuinely haven't been able to find most of the people I used to talk to on Deviantart, or Neopets, or any oekaki board. Either they've distanced themselves from their old usernames and teenage/young adult social media accounts (which is understandable, as I did the same thing) or they've flat-out stopped using any kind of social media entirely.
Wherever those people are, I hope they're doing well.
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