Donmai

Where do you usually get official art from?

Posted under General

Haoto

I've been looking at older animes and noticed that quite a lot of their official art has been lost to time without it ever being properly archived.
However, I managed to find some of them on third-party sites.
It made me wonder where exactly people get the official source from.

Are the official artworks permanently lost to time, or is there an archive somewhere?
I made sure to search for a question like this online, but nothing came up.
I tried using reverse image search engines, but they don't always find something.

Reply
Trouble Windows

The most common cases I see tend to be:

  • Direct game rips and scans of physical media
  • Official social media accounts
  • Official websites
  • The artist's social media accounts
  • Scans posted by others on social media or sites like Flickr
  • Fandom and other dedicated wikis
  • Other imageboards such as Yande.re and Zerochan

In my experience I've found luck hunting on Tumblr, as people will often reupload scans with a link back to the original scan (usually on Flickr). I also found a huge dump of old shoujo manga magazine wallpapers linked on there once, from Archive.org, so that's probably also worth a look. With Tumblr there isn't really any good way to search for them though, I tend to find them through people's reblogs most of the time.

Reply
Ylimegirl

Official web sources tend to vanish if they're older due to link rot as many promotional websites get shut down over time because web hosting isn't free. That or the website gets a fresh skin of paint and the old assets vanish into the void.

What I try to do is if I have a rough idea of where an official source might be is use archive.org to look if anyone saved older versions of the website that points towards what I'm looking for.

But sometimes all you can do is add the source request tag and hope someone else knows.

Reply
1