Every Danbooru artist tag with 200+ posts, placed by how they draw —
measured from their actual artwork, not their tags. Zoom in to see the art itself.
Click anything for samples, measured style and neighbours.
Reading the map
Positions are raw t-SNE coordinates and never move. Overlap is resolved by showing
one artist per screen cell, so an artist is always in the same place and zooming simply
reveals more of them.
Coordinates carry no units — only relative distance means anything, and neighbours
are computed in the full embedding space, not from what looks close on screen.
Searching by tag
Adding tags in Explore ranks artists by how much of their work carries
those tags — with several tags, the share carrying all of them. Only artists who
actually draw it are listed. The top hit is whoever draws it most, which is
not the same as whoever draws it best.
Percentages are coarse, so ties are common; artists tied on the same score
are ordered by how closely their artwork matches. When too few artists draw a
combination to rank by counting, the whole list switches to matching artwork and
says so. That reads subject, medium and mood well, and fine rendering style less
well. You can switch between the two at any time.
Like them, but…
An artist's panel can shift their neighbours toward a tag, or away from one.
The slider sets how hard: at the left you get their plain neighbours, at the right
the tag decides almost everything. The % beside each result is how much of
that artist's catalogue really carries the tag, so you can see whether the shift
did what it claims.
Pushing away works better than pulling toward. Removing content — the
same style without the sex, say — keeps far more of the original artist than
searching the tag on its own does. Pulling toward a tag only works where artists
who are both actually exist; where none do, the list slides into being an ordinary
tag search, and it says so when that happens rather than pretending.
What the numbers mean
Depth is how far down an artist's catalogue the quality holds up.
Reach is era-adjusted, so a 2010 artist is compared against 2010 rather than
against today. Under What they draw, plain chips are the artist's most
common tags and a ×N chip is one they draw N times more often than everyone
else does.
Closest artists comes in two flavours. How it looks compares their
artwork — line, shading, colour, texture. What's in it compares what the work
shows, from tags, with series and franchise removed — so it finds artists drawing
similar situations, not the same characters.
Regions are a continuum, not categories. Each layout has its own set,
named by hand from the artwork rather than generated, and checked against members
that were not used to write the label. Boundaries are soft — judge them by the artwork.
Two labels are worth knowing about. Airbrush gloss and Airbrush gloss,
explicit are one rendering style split by content, not two ways of drawing.
Flat & outlined is named for its rendering, but it gathers game and
creature fan art — the clearest place the map mixes what an artist draws with
how.
What this map gets wrong
Position recovers style locally — an artist's nearest neighbours really do
draw like them. At the largest scale the map tracks content instead: how explicit
an artist's work is predicts their neighbourhood better than any of the six style axes.
That cannot be subtracted without destroying the neighbourhoods, and it is partly
honest, since adult illustration is a genuine visual genre. Read the map close in.