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Chiho Saito’s 1999 Revolutionary Girl Utena Original Illustration Collection

IT’S HERE. IT’S DONE. IT’S FINISHED. NOW…IT’S YOURS. Happy Holidays, my friends.

Vanna here! I have posted some already about this project, and the responses I got, public and otherwise, have been absolutely incredible. Y’all have been reblogging and hyping this before it even finished…I haven’t felt so encouraged about an Utena project since the musicals! (Yes, streams soon, I promise.) You can read the other post to get more details, and catch my post here with more details about the process if you’re interested. The long and short of it?

This is the first artbook I ever scanned. I did it in 2001. In Photoshop, using multiple scans per page that took hours to process. But it was 2001. A half megabyte file that was 1250px wide was considered extremely hardcore and impressive. That’s just always been the business I’m in when it comes to Utena art, you know? 

It’s now the latest artbook I’ve scanned, and so much of the process, and effort involved, is unchanged. What has changed, is the result. Welcome to your new desktop background. Your new phone background. Your new poster print. 

What I’ve done here is attempt to create definitive digitized images of Chiho Saito’s work as offered by this book--I have removed the print moiré of the original scans, and used my literal decades of experience to try and tease out as much information from them as possible. Without being physically in front of the original artwork (which is a thing I’ve had the great fortune to get to do) this is The Most Chiho Saito you are ever going to get. I’ve tried my best to make sure there is a way to get it that works for everyone:

Do you just wanna scope 'em out? Look at some disaster gays? Grab your favorite one or two? This is the path for you! Check out the ‘compressed’ (not very) 10k ‘web friendly’ (not really) copy at the Bibliothèque, the media archiving wing of the Something Eternal forums at Empty Movement*. All the following links are also available from here. Do you want these copies? All of them? Don't just grab them individually, friend. This batch is 375MB and can be downloaded as a zip of the individual files here on our Google Drive.

Do you like digital archiving? Are you looking for a copy that preserves the archival quality of the effort but sits nice and comfy in a single file? This is for you. A minimally compressed 10k, 513MB version worked into a PDF is now up, shiny and chrome, on the Internet Archive. Do you like the idea of the minimal compression, but want the individual files in a zip? Yep I did that too, here's the drive link.

Are you looking to print these in a larger size? This is probably the only reason on Earth you’d ever want them, and yet a bunch of you are going to go straight for these. Here are the zero-compression JPG full size copies, most of them are 15k across, like simply a ridiculous size. Pick your fave and download it from our Google Drive! 

I am genuinely really proud of this work.** I was able to tease out so much new detail from these…her incredible layering techniques, the faintest brush of her highlights, and the full range of her delicate hand at whites and blacks… details commonly lost in digitization. I sincerely hope you find something here that you’re looking for, as an artist looking for inspiration, as a weeb looking for a desktop, as an archiver excited to see incredible 90s manga artwork saved forever in the digital realm. I feel like I have already said so much about them, and could keep going, but you know what? This work speaks for itself. Enjoy, use, explore, and definitely tell us what you think!

We love y’all. ~ Vanna & Yasha

* AHEM ASTERISK AHEM

You might be wondering what any of that is. Something Eternal? Biblewhatawhat??? EmptyMovement.com? You might even have done a double take at the word ‘forum.’ And you should!!!

I have a confession. This artbook was my ‘side project’ as I worked on this, *the main project.* For a couple years I’ve been banging around with a new domain, and originally I had other plans for it, but Elon Musk ruined my Twitter and Discord is well along on its way to enshittification, and well….we joke on the Discord a lot about ‘reject modernity, embrace forums’ and you know what? We’re right. So Yasha and I are putting our money where our mouths are once again, and doing something insane. We are launching, in 2023, a website forum. Obviously, this is not the official ‘launch’ per se, but I cannot announce the artbook without directing you to the forum, since it sits on the attached very cool gallery system. Oops! Told on myself. Another post more focused on the forum will be forthcoming, but if you are just that motivated to get in right away, you absolutely can! (This will help stagger new arrivals anyway, which is good for us!) If you would rather wait for the ‘official’ launch, by all means that’s coming, including a lengthy screed about how and why we’re doing this. In either case, remember: this is a couple weebs trying to make internet magic happen, we are not website developers by trade. Give us grace as we iron things out and grow into this cool new website thingie…hopefully along with some of you! :D

If you do join up, naturally, there is a thread about this project!

** If you like this kind of content, consider helping us pay for it! We do have a Patreon! If you’re wanting to use these in some public-facing distributive way, all we ask is for credit back to Empty Movement (ohtori.nu or emptymovement.com, either will work.) 

I would like to say ‘don’t just slap these files on RedBubble to get easy money’ but I know that saying this won’t effectively prevent it. Y’all that do that suck, but you’re not worth letting it rain on the rest of this parade. :)

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i thought my laptop was on its last leg because it was running at six billion degrees and using 100% disk space at all times and then i turned off shadows and some other windows effects and it was immediately cured. i just did the same to my roommate's computer and its performance issues were also immediately cured. okay. i guess.

so i guess if you have creaky freezy windows 10/11 try searching "advanced system settings", go to performance settings, and uncheck "show shadows under windows" and anything else you don't want. hope that helps someone else.

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fiona what you did to that snake was fucked up

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Akpevwe🎨 he/himArtist🇳🇬[ENG|FR]Storyteller|Illustrator@akpevwe_okotetelinktr.ee/a.ok_vii

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Recently I got to participate in a fun Geno Collab, where we all just drew Geno in different art styles! You can see the finished piece here (x), my Geno is just slightly to the right of the big one :) I tried to do my typical, over the top, edgy redesign for it. He's a Figma now, don't mess with him!

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2024 calendars are out!

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Ghost friends. An anonymous fear submitted to Deep Dark Fears - thanks!

You can find original artwork in my shop!

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My girlfriend's poetry book is coming out!

Hello Tumblr!

Sorry I'm on here so sparsely, but I wanted to come back on to let everyone know that my girlfriend's first book is coming out on October 1st, and it is available for preorder!

It's called The Bindings: The Girl With Cerebral Palsy And The Experiences That Hold Me Together. It's a collection of her poetry, and I know I'm biased, but believe me when I tell you it is amazing work.

If you're at all interested, please show your support by clicking on the link and pre-ordering!

https://store.bookbaby.com/book/the-bindings1

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one of lifes saddest tragedies is that breaking bad didnt come out a few years earlier so it could get a ps2 game

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happy autumn equinox!! 🌓 🍂

[chosimbaone]

My girlfriend's poetry book is coming out!

Hello Tumblr!

Sorry I'm on here so sparsely, but I wanted to come back on to let everyone know that my girlfriend's first book is coming out on October 1st, and it is available for preorder!

It's called The Bindings: The Girl With Cerebral Palsy And The Experiences That Hold Me Together. It's a collection of her poetry, and I know I'm biased, but believe me when I tell you it is amazing work.

If you're at all interested, please show your support by clicking on the link and pre-ordering!

https://store.bookbaby.com/book/the-bindings1

#Poetry #Cerebral Palsy #Black Women #Black Women Authors #Disability #Disabled Author #Disabled Poet #Black Poetry

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Goldy locs

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I can't believe this is still slowly doing numbers around a decade later.

I literally typed up the original post in the middle of reading The Iliad.

I was enjoying it so much I had to put it down and write a vague post about how badly my language arts teachers had presented the classics and the act of reading. About how those specific teachers had done nothing more than turn kids away from the joy of reading because to them if you didn't have a reverence for the correct books then you didn't have any business reading at all.

Glad to see my intention appears to have reached an understanding and receptive audience, more or less. When this post first went viral I had libs accusing me of being a Republican and right wing asshats calling me the f slur.

Literally had to delete the original post and go to a late night showing of 47 Ronin to clear my head.

Fun movie, btw, they should release an extended director's cut.

Force kids in school to read crappy, overrated books that are “the best books ever written” solely because they’re “classics” and then call those kids idiots because those aren’t the kind of books they like to read and sit back and wonder why we have a nation full of multiple generations worth of people who willfully and proudly refuse to read.

#Classic Novels

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Sci-Fi Dolphin Saturday is in the middle of its 90s phase: Here’s Christian Lassen’s “Cosmos” poster from 1991.