Creating artistic images with ASCII art
The Art of Letters
Creating images from letters and numbers is a complex matter, unless you have the right tools at hand.
ASCII artists are often genuine tinkerers: With meticulous attention, they create images, and even movies, solely from letters and digits. The combination of simple means and complexity of images is always fascinating. This extravagant art form goes back to the first half of the 20th century and has been known since the 1960s as ASCII art.
The images only use character sets without non-standard characters. These Latin characters are based on the English alphabet and later on the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). They contain uppercase and lowercase letters, basic delimiters, and control characters that come from the world of the telegraph. These characters can be found on almost any computer, allowing users to display the image in an identical manner wherever they are.
Artistic opportunities arise in particular by leveraging the amount of black in the various characters. The artist creates transitions between light and dark, and individual shapes, such as arches and curves, through different shades. The human brain's ability to abstract and recognize images using patterns assures the desired effect.
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