Trained on 58 images from irasutoya.com.

Do you feel like creating some cute Japanese style illustrations for your boring presentation? Then this is the LoRA you are looking for 😆😹.

According to this Chinese article, these irasutoya (illustrator) style images are all over Japan. But I am pretty sure that similar styles existed before the internet, because I've seen similar images appearing in signages in Anime in the 80s.

Here is a Google translation of the article:

Japan's "People's Illustration": In the era of copyrights, he designs free materials?

Does the following illustration look familiar? These similar-looking, often smiling (and weird) character illustrations can be found on almost all Japanese websites, posters, brochures, and other places.

Why are these materials all over Japan? Who drew the illustrations? This issue's editorial department will take you to explore the story behind the Japanese material website "irasutoya"!

1. Since when has irasutoya been everywhere in Japan?

A popular Japanese commentary article in 2016 pointed out that whether it is illustrations on websites, public welfare posters on the street, or store brochures, a cute style of illustration has "occupied" the lives of Japanese people unknowingly.

These illustrations all come from a free illustration material website for people to use - "irasutoya".

These illustrations will appear on promotional posters.

"All illustrations are free for use! Even for commercial purposes!" This is the biggest feature of "irasutoya" and the biggest reason why it can be widely used.

While designers are busy protecting their intellectual property rights, "irasutoya" goes the other way. It turns out that this is a successful business model. And its magic is far more than that...

2. What is on the irasutoya website?

Open the official website of "irasutoya" and you will see various classification labels of kindergarten cute style, including seasons, activities, characters, food, life, etc.

Because it is the New Year, the most popular material recently is "New Year's greeting card" (New Year's greeting card), and most Japanese still retain the habit of sending New Year's greeting cards.

According to the theme and type, there are many detailed pattern classifications, such as cows, Mount Fuji, photo frames, etc.

Seeing this, if you have already planned to label this website as "cute", then you are really confused by its cute appearance!

This website involves far more topics than these. In addition to daily life, there are also contents related to social hot news, such as same-sex marriage, fake news, school bullying, euthanasia... There are even some comics of buzzwords.

• 01 Illustration materials of sexual minorities

• 02 Illustration materials about fake news

• 03 "Reunion" of people sitting together playing with mobile phones

• 04 "Students eating lunch in the toilet"

As for the illustration materials about "euthanasia", you can also find social "marginal people", as well as otaku, chuunibyou, and office animals. The cute style of painting can send a chill down your spine.

• 01 Chuunibyou

• 02 Yandere

• 03 Daily life of office animals

Among these materials, the sense of disharmony formed by the combination of cute style and "dark themes" is also one of its charms.

Rather than saying that it is just a free material website, it is better to say that it is committed to building an illustration version of the encyclopedia: do not make good or bad judgments, as long as there are people or things in the world, they must be included. Here, you can find almost all the materials you want.

3. Is Irasutoya really free?

Yes. In most cases, it is completely free to use. Only when it is for commercial purposes and a product uses more than 20 different materials, you need to pay 1,000 yen per piece.

In addition, if you need to apply for higher-resolution images, you also need to pay a certain amount of money.

Designers or individuals can also reprocess the images on the basis of meeting the requirements, and they can be used for free regardless of posters, websites, movies, etc.

But this does not mean that the author has given up the copyright. The copyright of these contents still belongs to the author himself. Although free use is allowed, the materials themselves cannot be sold as commodities.

If the website cannot find the materials you want, you can even make a request to the author. The more people make the same request, the better it will be. The more specific the demand description is, the better (for example, workers who work overtime late at night, or editors who are rushing to meet deadlines...).

4. Are all the materials of Irasutoya created by one person?

That's right! The operation of the entire website, including the 25,000 or so illustration materials on the website, is created by one person. This mysterious man is called Mifune Takasi.

After the website became popular, he was interviewed by a TV program, but he refused to show his face and kept silent about his personal information.

How could this stump netizens? Soon, Japanese netizens sorted out his resume from the clues of his social software: 2000 University entrance major in graphic design 2002 Became a DTP designer 2005 Became a website designer 2008 Independent, became a freelance illustrator.

Netizens found out through SNS that his birthday is February 11, and he will be 40 years old in 2021. Netizens also found that he likes to post photos of food on Twitter, so they boldly speculated that he should be a man who is good at cooking and likes Hawaii very much.

Mysterious people always arouse everyone's curiosity. In addition to being interested in his private life, his creative speed also makes netizens exclaim "Too fast?!"

For example, on the day when the Reiwa era was released, there was the following submission.

To this day, no one knows what he looks like. We can only imagine what a 40-year-old illustrator who loves food and Hawaii looks like.

5. Why is irasutoya suddenly popular?

As an illustration material website, "irasutoya" suddenly became popular in 2016 and attracted the attention of the whole society. The reason was an illustration about a gashapon machine:

The picture shows a huge gashapon machine and a little man who keeps spinning gashapons. The little man is surrounded by gashapons and a smashed piggy bank.

And the gashapon he wants is "high above", and he can only keep throwing money into the gashapon machine to get it - this painting satirizes the low winning rate of the gashapon machine. After that, his interesting illustrations such as "The Collapse of the Human Pyramid" and "Children Who Broke the Game Console" continued to attract attention.

His interesting illustrations also include elementary school students who are miserable in order to perform the human pyramid at the sports meeting.

• A policeman monitoring the cell phones of ordinary citizens,

• seeing his own death notice on TV at home,

• bad comments from cyberbullying "keyboard warriors".

These witty and profound works are enough to show that the author Mifune has a strong sense of humor and expression, and expresses his opinions on social issues through illustrations.

However, soon after, he issued a statement "suspending the creation of current events", saying that if he continued, he might not be able to draw as happily as before.

6. the materials are free, where does the income come from?

I believe you are also confused-the materials are free to use, where does the income come from?

Mifune is an excellent illustrator and a talented businessman. "irasutoya" mainly relies on advertising revenue brought by a large number of visits to the website, in addition to line stickers, and the sale of high-resolution images.

The success of "irasutoya" is actually difficult to replicate-first of all, the amount of materials it provides is huge and very comprehensive, and ordinary websites cannot do this in a short time.

Secondly, its style. Its style is that it does not have a strong personal style, but is the type that you will forget after one look. It is precisely because of this that it can be used in a wider range of occasions.

"irasutoya" even started to make peripherals.

For example,

• figures——

• Joint coffee——

• Even, there are rice field paintings——

There are comments in Japan that "Irasutoya" is an epoch-making material website, but at the same time, there are also illustrators complaining that its existence breaks the balance of the illustration market.

Both the operator Mifune and the website itself are mysterious. In the process of solving the puzzle, we see an excellent illustrator who is full of enthusiasm, loves painting, and pays attention to social topics. Through his works, we are also stepping closer to the mysterious world of illustrations.

Author's public account: Tokyo Vision (ID: TokyoLens)