#alwayssacred

Hello!

I had another question like this and wrote a big long answer & when I went to save it as a draft, it disappeared!!! X_X I'll do my best to write it out again!

I don't actually know how I do it... I go into a blind haze and wake up hours later with dozens of tabs open and hundreds of graphics in my downloads. Not really, but it feels like it sometimes ^^'''

Usually, I start out by reverse image searching a graphic I already have on image search engines like Google Images, Yandex, etc. and opening a bunch of sites that host that same graphic, or by going into the 'similar images' section and looking for interesting graphics, thumbnails and sites that way. I look out for text-hosting (blogging, fanfiction) sites, self-hosted websites, forums and foreign language sites - I find a lot of my favorites from Japanese, Hindi and Italian-speaking sites in particular! From there I look for hyperlinks to other sites and start going down rabbit holes. I avoid popular image-hosting sites like Giphy and Pinterest, as well as popular English social media sites like Twitter and Instagram.

Text-hosting sites like Wattpad and Asianfanfics are good for finding organized collections of graphics, mainly layout-related graphics like dividers, headers and footers.

I find a lot of my decorative text on forums.

Blogging and foreign social media sites (especially Japanese as Japan invented emoji and decomail!) support .GIFs more often and I find a lot of tiny inline-sized pixels there.

Personal sites are great for doll collections!

Finding specific user accounts on these sites and pawing through their post history, uploads and friends is my favorite way to find little 'gold mines'. I sometimes also enter a general query into image search engines i.e. 'christmas divider pixel say' and filter by Colour -> Transparent and Type -> Animated (Google Images) to look for graphics and sites that way, but I find it to be quite surface-level and don't get a lot to chew on.

I also have a (neglected...) Discord server with a tiny lovely community of people that share their finds, help others find specific graphics, troubleshoot and pass around interesting websites and tools with one another. I've been a bit absent from the Discord during the school year but want to swallow the social anxiety & become more active now...!

<3 ~*~*~**~***~**~~** <3 ~*~*~*~*~*~****~~*~*~ <3

Rosa Multiflora