Danbooru

Turning "Official Artist Extras" into a tag

Posted under General

I agree, the only thing that needs to be added is a note for gacha properties and vtuber companies where many artists are involved and each only designed a character or two. In those cases, it only applies when the artist draws the character they designed (e.g Lack fanart of Lain Paterson would apply, but not fanart for other Nijisanji members that he didn't design himself).

I say to put up a BUR for the conversion and leave it to a vote, though I support it for sure.

I think it's good. We'd need some better guidelines, tho. The pool says artworks outside of the the character's game/anime/manga, aka their official material. But the sense of official art has expand, especially promotional art posted on social media. Stuff like milestone celebration or when the official account retweets the artist's posts. And it's easy to say for big company copyrights like games, since games do commissions a lot and anything not posted by an official account is probably not commissioned, so you can say it's a "fanart" by the artist, but what about manga? Isn't the manga artist their own copyright holder? How to define "official art"? Unless we want to make it very strict and anything posted outside of the main material gets the tag?

(btw this has also been mentioned once in forum #221703)

magcolo said:

But the sense of official art has expand, especially promotional art posted on social media. Stuff like milestone celebration or when the official account retweets the artist's posts.

I'm getting to feel like official art is really used a little too loosely on things like fanarts made by official artists and animators. Some of these things may be liked by the official accounts or other people actually involved in production, but does that necessarily make them "official"? For an example, post #5568606 and post #5712533 are currently tagged as "official art", but if you looks at the artist's profile on Twitter, it specifically says that all images are unofficial fanart.

I was actually working on something like this some time ago, however I got a bit lost in the process.
Someone on Discord helped me with gathering a list of posts of artists who
-Has official_art content in a character/copyright
-Has drawn other things in said copyright that aren't tagged official_art
Afterwards I was manually gardening posts which didn't have official_art, making sure they weren't unofficial art.

EB said:

For an example, post #5568606 and post #5712533 are currently tagged as "official art", but if you looks at the artist's profile on Twitter, it specifically says that all images are unofficial fanart.

I'm going to assume that was just an oversight on the uploader.

I think promotional art like milestones should count as official art on virtue of being promotional art, although they should also be tagged accordingly.

EB said:

For an example, post #5568606 and post #5712533 are currently tagged as "official art", but if you looks at the artist's profile on Twitter, it specifically says that all images are unofficial fanart.

If it’s already specified to be unofficial then of course we’ll take the artist’s words, I was talking about situations where no one said anything explicitly.

EB said:

I'm getting to feel like official art is really used a little too loosely on things like fanarts made by official artists and animators. Some of these things may be liked by the official accounts or other people actually involved in production, but does that necessarily make them "official"?

In pool #19275, almost all of the artists drew two artworks, with one posted by official account and another posted by self then retweeted by official. The self-posted ones weren’t clearly stated to be part of the commission and they do have considerably lower completeness than the official one, but they’re also assumed to be some sort of promotion so they were kept in the pool for now. How do we deal with those?

Another borderline example are songs, since they’re indie copyrights, unlike a commission by a big company, a lot of producer and illustrator relationships are more cooperative, and the illustrator feels like (or sometimes are) part of the official production team. How do we identify extra content posted by them? What I get is that currently reference sheet and milestone celebration are on the safe side of being considered official, but no idea on others.

EB said:

I'm getting to feel like official art is really used a little too loosely on things like fanarts made by official artists and animators.

This is probably due to the current wording of the wiki, specifically "Artwork that is made by the official company/artist of a series or character." As taken literally, these pieces would fall under the definition.

Anyway, for an overall definition, I think we can get by just asking "was it made with connection to the official copyright" and "was it made for work or for fun". There may be a few edge cases, as there are with any tag, but most posts made without official sanction for non-employment reasons should be fine.

I don't like this pool. I'd prefer official art continues to include stuff drawn by official artists etc. for a copyright even if it's not promotional art, for work, or through official channels. It would also reduce the number of ambiguous situations since you won't have to make a judgment call based on the sources and quality of the art.

Only reason to keep them separate would be because actual official stuff tends to have a higher quality standard and consistency, but most of the time I just want to see stuff from the original designers in the official style without knowing the artist names (if applicable).

LQ said:

I don't like this pool. I'd prefer official art continues to include stuff drawn by official artists etc. for a copyright even if it's not promotional art, for work, or through official channels. It would also reduce the number of ambiguous situations since you won't have to make a judgment call based on the sources and quality of the art.

Only reason to keep them separate would be because actual official stuff tends to have a higher quality standard and consistency, but most of the time I just want to see stuff from the original designers in the official style without knowing the artist names (if applicable).

It doesn't make much sense to tag kentllaall drawing Vermeil porn as official art just because he's the character designer. That's completely bonkers.

To be honest, thinking about it official artist is not a great name either. The tag is supposed to be for fanart of a copyright by the original artist, but "official artist" doesn't say anything about the fanart part. I can see new users regularly mistagging it, especially if they're ESL. Though to be fair, if this tag is going to be mutually exclusive with official art then it's just a matter of gardening official_art official_artist regularly.

This discussion has strayed too far from what is useful for an image gallery.

When I look at post #4783687 I don't go: "Whoa, this stylistically identical piece of art to the show despite being drawn by its very producer was not truly published under the magical seal of studio trigger thus this official art tag is not legally sound, yet another tag must be conceived to segregate these very specific cases".

EB said:

I'm getting to feel like official art is really used a little too loosely on things like fanarts made by official artists and animators. Some of these things may be liked by the official accounts or other people actually involved in production, but does that necessarily make them "official"? For an example, post #5568606 and post #5712533 are currently tagged as "official art", but if you looks at the artist's profile on Twitter, it specifically says that all images are unofficial fanart.

Anime is made by people, I don't think It's an scandal to say that what these people may create in their free time for the IPs they work in is official-grade content. In fact it may be more official than no-name sweatshop illustrations under official capacity. For all it matters to danbooru 'all images are unofficial fanart' is legal coverage (it most likely is as well).

How important is the seal of corporations really? Are mangaka sketches not official (e.g post #3137399) just because they aren't commercially published?

If you do feel like creating the tag please don't make it mutually exclusive, as it's adding another layer of complexity to searches with a tag nobody will know it exists.

Username_Hidden said:

I feel that many times context is required. The tags are easy to separate for big games most of the time, but what about small indie games, where the line between official and unofficial gets more blurry?

Well that's the big problem, with minor copyrights there's the risk of pedantic users mass adding official artist to every single post from any webcomic that is not the main comic. There's so many pixiv manga and webcomics out there that started with a one-off picture or that get in-between illustrations from bored artists between comic pages, if we go down that route 90% of the tag will be random characters from 10-post tags because the artist's the only one who draws that copyright. Is 9k posts of comics that would be tagged original if they had one less post on site really the kind of stuff we expect to see in this tag?
The only way that's going to be prevented is to draw hard lines on what should go into this tag. If we leave it up to the average user it's just going to be yet another tag ruined by idiots.

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