Remember when you were a child connecting small dots to
create a picture? Now imagine those dots as letters, numbers and Symbols. That
is what ASCII Art is. ASCII artists
create a picture starting with a plain text file. Using keys on the keyboard
the artist slowly develops a picture one key stroke at a time. This type of
drawing seems to be extremely time consuming. Not only do you have to draw a picture
you have to plan out what letter would be best where. Shading with this type of
art is important even though it is just characters from the keyboard. Large
letters are grouped together to aid in the process of darkening the image.
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I find
this type of art intriguing. A whole picture made with letters. This type of
art is nothing new. People used text as art even in late 1800’s, a few years
after the invention of the type writer. Back then, it was called “Typewriter art” (history) . It was used to decorate books such as bibles and other books. The artists sometimes compete in typewriter
art contests. In today's age we use these pictures in emails to bypass the memory limit
of just mb.
Some people just do it for fun. Artists are able to copy and paste on
anything they want. I’ve seen such artworks in comment sections around youtube.
Some are cute animals, but some are filled with profanity. They are all
interesting since it is just random characters on a page. Take a look at this
one by Tim Park. This picture is of Ami Mizuno aka Sailor Mercury from the Sailor Moon tv show. From far away the viewer cannot tell that it was composed of keystrokes. The picture looks like a normal drawing until the viewer zooms in. That is where the magic happens. This is the power of ASCII.
Works Cited
history.
n.d. 19 11 2017. <http://www.oocities.org/spunk1111/history.htm>.
Park, Tim. Ami Mizuno. 19 11 2017.
<http://www.chris.com/ascii/index.php?art=anime%20and%20manga/sailor%20moon>.
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