Last Modified: 8/6/2017

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/\  _  \/\  _`\ /\  _`\ /\__  _\/\__  _\    /\  _  \       /\ \__
\ \ \L\ \ \,\L\_\ \ \/\_\/_/\ \/\/_/\ \/    \ \ \L\ \  _ __\ \ ,_\
 \ \  __ \/_\__ \\ \ \/_/_ \ \ \   \ \ \     \ \  __ \/\`'__\ \ \/
  \ \ \/\ \/\ \L\ \ \ \L\ \ \_\ \__ \_\ \__   \ \ \/\ \ \ \/ \ \ \_
   \ \_\ \_\ `\____\ \____/ /\_____\/\_____\   \ \_\ \_\ \_\  \ \__\
    \/_/\/_/\/_____/\/___/  \/_____/\/_____/    \/_/\/_/\/_/   \/__/
    
(Please click on PENCELAND.com above to go to my main page.)

I am no longer updating this page so it may get outdated,
and it has been removed from the menu bar on the main page.
ASCII Arts Web Ring

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Galleries | Scarecrow | Tips | My sigs | Newsgroups

  For years I was into ASCII Art and created this page but I haven't done any ASCII Art for many years. The artwork on this page is all ASCII Art (text-based), not graphical (like *.jpg or *.gif), sometimes with a little help from Javascript and CSS..

I have always been fascinated by ASCII Art, text based visual art created with a text editor. The first time I developed text art on a computer occurred not on a PC but when I was a programmer at a company in the 1980s that had a central mid-range EBCDIC (not ASCII) IBM computer system (a System-38) where every workstation had green-screen monitors (green dot-matrix lettering on a black background), so my first time creating ASCII Art was on an EBCDIC terminal, not an ASCII PC. I wanted to create a new logon screen showing the company logo (an old sailing ship riding on ocean waves surrounded by a circle) to replace the default IBM System-38 Sign On screen (which you were allowed to do and IBM told you how). Working within the limitations of a monospaced 24x80 grid, I used different combinations of keyboard characters to achieve the many curves in the logo image. After my logo screen was implemented it was a joy to walk around our offices in Boston, Washington, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore and see my artwork displayed on every screen! This was text art on a mainframe computer (midrange actually—IBM System-38 then AS/400), not ASCII art on a PC like you have now.
(Sorry—I didn't save an example of this, and it was probably replaced after I left that company in 1994.)

I discovered ASCII Art online, where people had been creating it regularly for years and posting it to bulletin-boards (before the World‑Wide‑Web there were these dial-up shared blogs known as "bulletin boards") under the name "ASCII Art". Even though the computer world has become much more graphical, ASCII Art has had a loyal following and new people are discovering it all the time. As proof of its popularity, I have seen on statistics for my website that "ascii art" is a frequently used search phrase that brings people to my site, and also that this is a frequently visited page, which certainly motivates me to keep this page current.

I consider myself more of an enthusiast than a creative artist, so at the present time my personal contribution to the ASCII Art world is primarily to provide access to the works and resources of others with this webpage. Maybe if I find the time I will create some more of my own and post it.


                     www
                    (o o)
=================ooO=(_)=Ooo
____ _ _ _ / ___| __ _ | || | ___ _ __ (_) ___ ___ | | _ / _` || || | / _ \| '__|| | / _ \/ __| | |_| || (_| || || || __/| | | || __/\__ \ \____| \__._||_||_| \___||_| |_| \___||___/
Unfortunately, ascii artists frequently create websites on domains like geocities, which tend to expire. I am trying to keep track of these and fix or delete them. Bear with me.
Individuals
Ascii Art by Henry Segerman – very good perspective art
Ascii Art Dictionary (Andreas Freise)
gallery of original ASCII-art by llizard aka ejm
ascii art by b'ger (Joris Bellenger)
Ilmari Karonen: Ascii art
STARS WARS ASCIIMATION
The Sunny Spot - ASCII-Art
Collections & more
Ascii Picture Collections - sorted by artist name
ASCII-tism
=a-s-c-i-i=e-x-h-i-b-i-t-i-o-n= – a German site (some English)
Who is who in ASCII art
Compiled by Veronica Karlsson
Compiled by Andreas Freise

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____ / ___| ___ __ _ _ __ ___ ___ _ __ ___ __ __ \___ \ / __|/ _` | '__|/ _ \ / __|| '__|/ _ \\ \ /\ / / ___) | (__: (_| | | | __/| (__ | | | (_) |\ V V / |____/ \___|\__,_|_| \___| \___||_| \___/ \_/\_/
  I became fascinated with ASCII Art when I first saw Bob Allison's work on his Scarecrow pages (the link goes to an archive since his website is gone), some of which I have collected below. Bob, who was the moderator of the newsgroup rec.arts.ascii, had a website named BOBAWORLD that was so elaborate (here's a site map - ignore the links, they don't work) that at first I suspected that Bob Allison was not an actual person but a composite of many people. His site, which ceased to exist in 1996, had many fascinating sections including Uncle Bob's Kids' Page (wonderful G-rated page), Spider's Pick of the Day (links to cool websites), The Michael Jordan Page (I believe Bob was from Chicago), The Web Masters' Page (great help with web-authoring, I have a link to a copy of this on my Online Tips page), a Beatles page, and of course the Scarecrow pages.

  "People ask me, 'How did I end up moderating rec.arts.ascii, maintaining the ASCII ART FAQ, tending the Scarecrow's FTP site, keeping the Scarecrow's ASCII Art Archives, running the Scarecrow's ASCII Art WWW Link?'

The answer is, it just sort of happened. Since I liked it and collected it, and there was no big collections of it, I just formatted my edited collection, added comments, put a logo on it and offered it to the Net. I wasn't prepared for the response. I got bombarded with requests. After that, I made a FAQ, again because there wasn't one. Then came the rec.arts.ascii, the FTP site, and the WWW site."
-- Bob Allison
 

There are archived versions of many of these pages around the Internet. You can find them by searching on "BOBAWORLD" or "Bob Allison" or "Scarecrow" but you will also find many links to to Bob's now defunct sites. Bob's reply to my email asking him why he took it down was, not surprisingly, "It got too big."
The Scarecrow pages  (my saved copies of them)
Best of the Scarecrow's Sigs
Scarecrow's ASCII Art Archive 1.0 – January 3, 1994
Scarecrow's ASCII Art Archive 2.0 – March 21, 1994
Scarecrow's ASCII Art Reference 4.9.1 – September 25, 1995
Best of the Scarecrow's BBS Gallery 1.3 – May 16, 1994
Best of the Scarecrow's 3-D Gallery 2.0 – June 5, 1995
Best of the Scarecrow's GIF Gallery 1.1 – March 28, 1994
Bob Allison's SAAA - Scarecrow's ASCII ART Archive

More Bob Allison pages
Bob Allison's Ascii Art Gallery
Bob Allison's Ascii Art FAQ (1996)

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                    (o o)
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_____ _ |_ _|(_) _ __ ___ | | | || '_ \ / __| | | | || |_) |\__ \ |_| |_|| .__/ |___/ |_|
  Generally, ASCII Art is presented on a webpage bracketed by the <PRE> ... </PRE> tags, which applies the fixed-width font setting in your browser and turns off word wrap. From a viewer perspective, if you don't like the way it looks in your browser try different monospaced fonts. Thanks to computers, text art is a very trial-and-error process. In the early days, when output could only be printed, I am sure it was much less elaborate, and the artists may have settled for less, but now you can just make the most miniscule modifications until you get it exactly that way you want, especially when working with greyscale and curves.
FAQs & tutorials
Wikipedia: ASCII art
Alt.Ascii-Art FAQ
Alt.Ascii-Art Tutorials – Andreas Freise includes many others
ASCII Art Tutorial by Julio Sepia aka Solid - Roy/SAC
Joris Bellenger – b'ger's step-by-step of converting gif-to-ascii
Ascii Graphical Techniques by Rowan Crawford
ASCIItech – written by Jorn Barger in 1993, still valid
Tools
  There is a variety of software to help produce text art, some that will convert an image file to an ASCII layout, which can be very helpful in getting started (see b'ger's tutorial link for a good description of this), but some say that using software to convert input is not "art", that it is only a conversion. Well, all artists use tools, and some tools are more sophisticated than others. We are already using computers instead of typewriters. Would these same critics not accept electronic music as art? FIGlet is a program that will convert a word or phrase into different fonts with larger letters made up of individual ASCII characters, like the ones I used in the titles on this page. JavE is a popular ASCII editor where you work in a grid (purists will criticize it for doing much of the creative work for you). There are many others, some of the older ones even DOS-based, but I have only used these.

ASCII Generator – I created my section titles for this page here
FIGlet.org
     FIGlet Server - ASCII Banner/Signature Generator
JavE (Java ASCII Versatile Editor)

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                     \\\
                    (o o)
=================ooO=(_)=Ooo
____ _ _ / ___|(_) __ _ _ __ __ _| |_ _ _ _ __ ___ ___ \___ \| |/ _` | '_ \ / _` | __| | | | '__/ _ \/ __| ___) | | (_| | | | | (_| | |_| |_| | | | __/\__ \ |____/|_|\__, |_| |_|\__,_|\__|\__,_|_| \___||___/ |___/
  ASCII drawings are frequently used in "signatures" that appear at the end of emails and newsgroup postings. Most email software can be set to automatically include signatures as part of the compose process. Years ago, if you received email from me or read something I posted, you may have seen some of the signatures I used. One of my favorites was when I had my name spelled out like this. You can see it better if you get back a little from your screen and sort of take your eyes out of focus, or simply click the button to  darken the background . My name is outlined with the characters you see. I used the parentheses characters because I could not be sure what font the viewer would be using (I guess macros get around this) and I found that in most fonts, both variable-width and monospaced, a single parenthesis and a single space ' ' take up the same width so I could control (predict) how it would look.

In ASCII Art some prefer the background to be dark and the text to be white, so I am giving you the option to see it both ways here.

background color
 (alternate viewing contrast) 
((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
))))      ))     )))  ))      ))
(((  ((((((  ((  ((  ((  (((((((
))))      ))     )))  ))  ))))))
(((  ((((((  ((  ((  ((  (((((((
))))      ))  ))  ))  ))      ))
((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

or
))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
((((      ((     (((  ((      ((
))))  ))))))  ))  ))  ))  ))))))
((((     (((     (((  ((  ((((((
))))  ))))))  ))  ))  ))  ))))))
((((      ((  ((  ((  ((      ((
))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
 
Here is a variety of ASCII signatures I have experimented with.

background color
 (alternate viewing contrast) 
((((      ((     (((  ((      (( Eric Pence
))))  ))))))  ))  ))  ))  ))))))
((((     (((     (((  ((  (((((( email@domain.com
))))  ))))))  ))  ))  ))  ))))))
((((      ((  ((  ((  ((      (( www.penceland.com

((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
)))))      ))      ))  ))      )))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
((((  ((((((  ((  ((  ((  (((((((((( Eric Pence ((((((((((((
)))))      ))     )))  ))  ))))))))) email@domain.com   ))))
((((  ((((((  ((  ((  ((  (((((((((( www.penceland.com (((((
)))))      ))  ))  ))  ))      )))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
)))      ))      ))  ))      ))
((  ((((((  ((  ((  ((  Eric Pence
)))      ))     )))  )) email@domain.com
((  ((((((  ((  ((  ((  www.penceland.com
)))      ))  ))  ))  ))      ))
(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

/////////////// email@domain.com
/////      //     ///  //      /
////  //////  //  //  //  //////
///      //     ///  //  ///////
//  //////  //  //  //  ////////
/      //  //  //  //      /////
////////////// www.penceland.com

email@domain.com :::::::::::::::
:::::  ___/:  ___  /:  /:  ___/:
::::  /::::  /:: ,/:  /:  /:::::
:::  ___/:  ___ ,::  /:  /::::::
::  /::::  /::  |:  /:  /:::::::
:_____/:__/::__/:__/:_____/:::::
www.penceland.com ::::::::::::::

email@domain.com
...._/_/_/.._/_/_/.._/.._/_/_/
..._/......_/.._/.._/.._/.....
.._/_/_/.._/_/_/.._/.._/......
._/......_/._|..._/.._/.......
_/_/_/.._/.._/.._/.._/_/_/....
www.penceland.com

email@domain.com
·····  .../··  ...  /··  /··  .../·
····  /·····  /·· ,/··  /··  /·····
···  .../··  ... ,···  /··  /······
··  /·····  /··  ···  /··  /·······
·...../··../··../··../··...../·····
www.penceland.com

email@domain.com
////////////////////////////////
/////      //      //  //      /
////  //////  //  //  //  //////
///      //     ///  //  ///////
//  //////  //  //  //  ////////
/      //  //  //  //      /////
////////////////////////////////
www.penceland.com

     email@domain.com
    @@@@@@\\@@@@@@\\@@\\@@@@@@\
   @@\\\\\\@@\\@@\\@@\ @@\\\\\
  @@@@@@\\@@@@@\\\@@\\@@\
 @@\\\\\\@@\\@@\\@@\\@@\
@@@@@@\\@@\\@@\\@@\\@@@@@@\
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
www.penceland.com

     email@domain.com
    ((((((((;;(((((((((;;;((((;;;(((((((;
   ((((;;;;;;((((;;((((;;((((;;((((;;;;;
  ((((((((;;(((((((((;;;((((;;((((;
 ((((;;;;;;((((;;((((;;((((;;((((;
((((((((;;((((;;((((;;((((;;;(((((((;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
www.penceland.com

email@domain.com
----((((((((--(((((((((---((((---(((((((-
---((((------((((--((((--((((--((((------
--((((((((--(((((((((---((((--((((-------
-((((------((((--((((--((((--((((--------
((((((((--((((--((((--((((---(((((((-----
www.penceland.com

email@domain.com
::::((((((((::(((((((((:::((((:::(((((((:
:::((((::::::((((::((((::((((::((((::::::
::((((((((::(((((((((:::((((::((((:::::::
:((((::::::((((::((((::((((::((((::::::::
((((((((::((((::((((::((((:::(((((((:::::
www.penceland.com

email@domain.com
)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
)))))------)))------)))--)))------)
))))--)))))))--))--)))--)))--))))))
)))------)))-----))))--)))--)))))))
))--)))))))--))--)))--)))--))))))))
)------)))--))--)))--)))------)))))
)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
www.penceland.com

email@domain.com
*****  ___/*  ___  /*  /*  ___/*
****  /****  /** ,/*  /*  /*****
***  ___/*  ___ ,**  /*  /******
**  /****  /**  |*  /*  /*******
*_____/*__/**__/*__/*_____/*****
www.penceland.com

email@domain.com
...._/_/_/.._/_/_/.._/.._/_/_/
..._/......_/.._/.._/.._/.....
.._/_/_/.._/_/_/.._/.._/......
._/......_/._|..._/.._/.......
_/_/_/.._/.._/.._/.._/_/_/....
www.penceland.com

But eventually I got tired of people unfamiliar with text art asking me, "What are those wavy lines at the end of your email?" so I stopped using an ascii sig.


   Top of page

                     ***
                    (o o)
=================ooO=(_)=Ooo
_ _ | \ | | ___ __ __ ___ __ _ _ __ ___ _ _ _ __ ___ | \| | / _ \\ \ /\ / // __| / _` || '__|/ _ \ | | | || '_ \ / __| | |\ || __/ \ V V / \__ \| (_| || | | (_) || |_| || |_) |\__ \ |_| \_| \___| \_/\_/ |___/ \__, ||_| \___/ \__,_|| .__/ |___/ __/ | | | |___/ |_|
  I used to have all the ascii art usenet groups listed here but they don't seem to function in browsers anymore, so I am just providing a link to Google Groups, where they are offered in a web format.

alt.ascii-art