No Puri No Life!: How To Take Purikura Part 5: Decorating!

This is the fun part! Almost all of this will be covered in detail in later posts but for now I’ll just go over the basics.

As purikura is often a two person activity there are two screens for you to decorate on. If you are more than two people you can either leave the decorating up to two people, swap and decorate separate pictures each, or as we did a couple of times change out after a few seconds each and keep changing and see what kind of crazy decorations you end up with!

POINT! If there is no-one else waiting to take pictures most machines stop the timer with some time on the clock so you get unlimited “bonus time”, however! I have been on empty machines that did not give bonus time, so be warned!

So, as I said you have two touch screens and two stylus pens to work with. All six pictures can be accessed by touching the small thumbnails usually at the top of the screen. This way you can choose to decorate any of the pictures.

POINT! Don’t forget to check you’ve decorated all the pictures! Or you might end up with one lonely plain one!

Your options are divided by type and then again by categories within the type, on a new machine I usually take a few seconds to click through and see what the machine has.

Sections on the purikura decorating screen

These are the most common types:

スペシャル (special) New features or things that are new for this machine, the seasonal stamps are usually here, along with hair/make-up features, sometimes specific stamps for specific frames etc, anything that is unusual would be here

ペン (pen) I get so overwhelmed with the pen choices!

スタンプ (stamps) little pictures you can add, often hearts, stars, hats, sunglasses, flowers, could be anything!

コロコロ (rolling stamps) drag your pen to make lines of hearts, stars, etc, sometimes these spell out messages!

メッセージ (messages) pre-written messages, sometimes with wacky Engrish that we love, these can sometimes be split up into ラブ (love) 友 (friend) 学校(school) etc I've seen diet sets, activity sets, fashion sets... They are also sometimes split by size, (one kanji, short messages or long sentences) or by orientation (horizontal vs. vertical). Alphabet/hiragana/katakana stamps are usually found under the message section.

As each machine might be different, sometimes the rolling stamps are found under stamps, and sometimes the alphabet section is separate.

TIP! Sometimes people share working on pictures and some people like to decorate their own pictures, if the picture looks like someone has a theme in mind when they decorated it I usually leave it alone or ask if I can add something. If it’s a bit crazier I usually go ahead and play too!

If you are on a timer then it will start to count down when you are running out of time, if you are in bonus time and someone enters the machine it will tell you that it is re-starting the clock. Otherwise when you are finished you need to find the “finish” button. It will either say “終わり” “おわり” or”終了” on some machines this finishes both screens on others both people need to tap the finish button. It will ask you if you are really finished. You’ll probably choose between either はい (yes, I’m finshed) or いいえ (No, I’m not finished), or between 終了 (finished) or 戻る (go back).