Lorde's Guide to delving through JP Amateur artist websites for more images without knowing how to read Japanese.
Gonna wright this
small (ended up bigger than I thought) guide here because I feel it could really help out people trying to find more images for their characters. Note that it is often better to rely on E-hentai or rule34, especially since both sites have extensive images collections. But if you want something new and or looking for images of not so popular characters. And the character was originally of JP origin. Then this guide is for you.
Ok, first thing you need to know is that you don't need to know any Japanese at all to surf JP sites. You just need some patience. You are going to do a lot of Google image searches with family|content filters off (duh) and you will be hovering your mouse pointer over links to see where they go in the status bar. The status bar is the real trick because URL's need to be in good old fashioned Alphanumeric (Ascii to be precise) to be considered valid. And since it's a language and character set JP users aren't accustomed to, they generally use the same directory structure on different sites. With that, lets get started.
:::::::::::::::::::::::First stop Wikipedia:
If you are going to start searching JP sites, you are going to need a place to start, and the best place is usually with a character or game|anime name in Kanji|Hiragana. Now, thankfully, you don't need to actually know how to write those names in a JP character set. Just go to wikipedia, type in the characters name, and boom. You will usually have the characters original JP name next to the character name on their page as well as the JP version of the series name. Copy Paste that into a text file for future use and you now have a place to start your search.
:::::::::::::::Google Image search "Entry point", It's pretty much made of suck, but a good first step:
Welcome to Google Image search. The land of broken promises and broken image links. At the very least, you will have a starting point. You can refine your search down a bit by popping one of these keywords in next to your character name. Ero, Gallery, 18禁 (Note if anyone finds anymore let me know) It helps with some characters. But with others, these might start popping porn movie covers in your results. If you find new pics in google images right off the bat. Congratulations and I hate you
. More likely though, You will see some images that have been around since early 2000 on the web. It all depends on how lucky you are and what character you are looking for.
But at least you have an "entry point"
::::::::::::::::Google Web search "Entry point" Same as above minus the picture aid:
.... I hate google, they prioritize blogs and commerce sites over amateur sites in their search results and we are looking for the amateur sites. You will most likely find the JP homepages of the companies that release the Anime|game you where looking for, Links to fan blogs of the series, links to doujinshi sale sites like DMM, Melonbooks and dlsite (more on dlsite later) and finally.... 2ch. I hate 2 chan with a <bleep>ing passion. Yes, 2 chan. The forerunner to the infamous 4chan. It's obnoxious because it has a slashdot effect. Meaning, whatever it links to, goes down HARD. You will notice you are on a 2ch site right away when you see the ancient webforum design in grey background black text standard mode. You will also notice a lot of links to images.... That have all 404'd into web oblivion. And some are only are only 2 months old. That's how fast 2ch can rape a site. God awful useless site if you can't read Japanese.
Every once in awhile though you will run into an amature artist site or a Hentai blog and that's what you are looking for.
:::::::::::::::Cheating a little with Dlsite.com (Circle entry point):
Before I start with Dlsite let me explain the concept of a circle. A circle is basically a group of amateur artists. Many draw hentai. And that's it for Mr. explanation on circles.
Dlsite is a great entry point into amateur artist sites that even has direct links to the websites you are looking for. Sadly, a drunken monkey designed their search engine and they don't seem to care. Searching for things on dlsite require the use of * in place of letters in a character name.... randomly. Maybe this is their way of keeping copyright lawyers from finding out that there are people making naughty pics of different companies IP's. Doesn't matter because it's annoying.
But you can find some great artists sites using Dlsite as a base (can also buy some artist sets, but those are most likely on e-hentai and hongfire already.) First, if you haven't been to dlsite like ever, you should probably go there and check out the english version of the site.
http://eng.dlsite.com/pick any image set, game, whatever and get used to the format. It will help when you are digging through the JP version of the site. Why the JP version? Some artists refuse to sell to us "gaijin" so the jp version has more content. (note you can still buy from the jp version of the site. Dlsite doesn't care one way or another if you are JP, NA, EU or space alien as long as you have a valid credit card. Just use the English order form as a template to fill out the JP one.)
While you are looking at the image set you chose. Notice that under the picture for the image set you have 3 fields. ::Title, ::circle, ::website. These 3 are the most useful to you and are in the exact same order on the JP version of the site. The JP version of the title is useful if you are looking for the "free" (haha lulz) version of the set on hongfire or e-hentai and using the english version of the title gave you nada . CPing the jp title into google with site:hongfire.com prepended to it will usually get you the set. (will need a bittorrent client though) The circle field is useful for both the english and jp versions. It will just show all the sets this circle has released on the site.
The Website field is what we are most interested in and it's a safe bet that if the artist released a set with a character, he probably has more of that character on his site. (not always see "actually surfing the sites" section)
The easiest way to get to the JP version of dlsite is to go to google and type
site:dlsite.com <jp version of character|series name>
You won't get everything on dlsite from that. (See the above search engine writing monkeys) But you will get enough to find the amateur sites.
::::::::::Actually Surfing the sites:
Ok lets discuss the most common sites we are looking for.
Gallery sites:- Sites with a Gallery of images (dur) Either thumbnailed or text galleries. I'll give some tips for text galleries later.
Example,
http://azasuke.jp/sea.htmlMost gallery sites are on sakura.ne.jp or biglobe.ne.jp. Both networks may drop a site for whatever reason, taking whatever art they had with them.
Blog Sites:- Also called Diaries in Japan. (seriously) Harder to navigate than gallery sites. Especially if the blogger decides to write about pocky or what colored panties he likes best for 2 months before actually posting images. Most, thankfully, post lots of images to their blog. (more frequently than the gallery sites do) and they don't tend to delete older images as often to make room for new.
Example,
http://onkin.blog81.fc2.com/most blog sites are on fc2.com. fc2 is a bit more stable then sakura or biglobe. But 2ch can change that in a hurry. Most defunct blogs happen because 2ch killed the sites bandwith.
Doujinshi Advert site. These get on my nerves and are becoming increasingly common these days. Basically, all these sites exist purely to advertise the artists Doujinshi. Very little in the way of free art so it's a bust. (can of course get the sets on e-hentai or hongfire as usual though )
Example,
http://saberfish.jp/top.htmlOk now that you found a few sites, you probably ran into the dreaded moonspeak. Now, no, I don't mean the actual Japanese language (settle down bleeding hearts). I mean what you will see if you don't have Japanese character sets installed on your computer. It's a string of ? and ! and boxes with numbers in them and symbols that look like something you'd find on wreckage from a UFO crash site. No living thing on this planet can read that (or stand looking at it for very long) so don't worry about learning it.
To see actual Japanese text, go to this site
http://kb.iu.edu/data/aelp.htmland follow the instructions there.
Getting actual Japanese to show up in your browser is useful when you want to use your browsers Find function for actually finding a characters name in a webpage. The find function won't understand moonspeak anymore than you can, so setting the display settings up correctly will enable you to use it.
::::::::::::: Things to look for on the sites:
There are 4 things you want to look for on these sites.
Gallery, Garrery, img, image, pic, picture, CG or something along these lines: Websites image gallery
Diary, Blog: Websites blog (some are home pages that link to blogs) more time consuming to surf than galleries but well worth the effort since a lot of images never before seen by the west may be there.
Links: Links to other sites. (dur) If the artist isn't obsessive, compulsive he will have like minded artists linked in this section. Meaning you may find more images outside of google. If he is obsessive, compulsive you will see about 100 links to sites that have nothing to do with art, much less what he draws. May link to banner collection sites. Those are a gold mine of Amateur art sites.
Works: Artists Doujinshi work (dlsite or melanbooks) and links to professional work they have done. Search them on hongfire or e-hentai.
Now if site navigation is in English, your work is done. If not, you will have to float over the links on the site and check your web browsers status bar. You should see the path pop up down there. (if not they are probably using Javascript to block that. Firefoxes no-script takes care of that.) Look for the above keywords in the directory structure of the link. (example somesite.sakura.ne.jp/stuff/gallery.html) and click the link. It's that simple once you actually get to the site.
:::::::::::::::Some tips and things to look out for.
Artists like to delete older work to make room for newer items on the website. This really isn't necessary these days, with HD space getting cheaper and cheaper, But It's almost traditional so be aware of that if you run into a 404 from google. Back up in the URL to get to the main site and you may find some newer images of the character.
if you got the link from 2ch however.......
Artists tastes change all the time, so someone that liked a character last year may never make an image of that character ever again. Example of this is azasuke. Used to make some very good pictures of Ivy Valentine (not to mention soul calibur in general) but suddenly stopped to devote all his time making Revy pics from Black Lagoon Heroines. (very annoying)
Your Browsers find function is your best friend. Especially on text galleries. You can also use it on Obvious non artist sites to find why the hell google brought you to this page. (sometimes a link to an artists site is buried in a blog.) But google being google you may end up in a website that has 0 of the keywords you used.
And that's it for surfing JP websites.