ASCII Art Assignment 10/18

Kevin Wagenheim

10/18

ASCII Art Assignment

When browsing through Chris' collection, I had to go right to the cartoon section. I found all the illustrations to be pretty funny and interesting. These images seem so simple to make, yet I know for a fact I could not sit there and carefully place characters like that. It would drive me up the wall! I have never looked through a collection like this one, but I remember making very small ones when I was into Instant Messaging software in grade school. These images are fun, and easy to share with friends.

When looking more into the collection, I noticed that some of the images were fully filled in with symbols, and some of them were just outlined using the symbols /,|, \, and (). I even found a few that were outlined, and then the next image was the same but filled in using a symbol. Some of the symbols were meaningful to the image as well. For example, there was a Micky Mouse image made of the letter M. I also ran into a calligram of a poem shaped into a dolphin, which I thought was pretty clever. 

In my Art 210 course, my instuctor shared a link with us that lead to a website of an ASCII art piece. Someone has an ongoing project to make a stop-motion ASCII art animation of the whole entire first Star Wars film. Every detail, including the setting and dialog is shown. It was pretty amazing to see that people are really into this art form I couldn't imagine the patience it must take to create a project so long and detailed. Then again, when its just made of text, copy and paste is a good tool to have.