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(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 I am no longer updating this page so it may get outdated, and it has been removed from the menu bar on the main page. |
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| Galleries | Scarecrow | Tips | My sigs | Newsgroups |
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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. 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. |
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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.
 Ascii Art by Henry Segerman – very good perspective art Ascii Art Dictionary (Andreas Freise) gallery of original ASCII-art by llizard aka ejmascii art by b'ger (Joris Bellenger)Ilmari Karonen: Ascii artSTARS WARS ASCIIMATION The Sunny Spot - ASCII-Art
Ascii Picture Collections - sorted by artist nameASCII-tism=a-s-c-i-i=e-x-h-i-b-i-t-i-o-n= – a German site (some English)
 Compiled by Veronica KarlssonCompiled by Andreas Freise |
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\___ \ / __|/ _` | '__|/ _ \ / __|| '__|/ _ \\ \ /\ / /
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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.
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 SigsScarecrow's ASCII Art Archive 1.0 – January 3, 1994Scarecrow's ASCII Art Archive 2.0 – March 21, 1994Scarecrow's ASCII Art Reference 4.9.1 – September 25, 1995Best of the Scarecrow's BBS Gallery 1.3 – May 16, 1994Best of the Scarecrow's 3-D Gallery 2.0 – June 5, 1995Best of the Scarecrow's GIF Gallery 1.1 – March 28, 1994Bob Allison's SAAA - Scarecrow's ASCII ART Archive
| More Bob Allison pages |
Bob Allison's Ascii Art GalleryBob Allison's Ascii Art FAQ (1996)
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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 artAlt.Ascii-Art FAQAlt.Ascii-Art Tutorials – Andreas Freise includes many othersASCII Art Tutorial by Julio Sepia aka Solid - Roy/SACJoris Bellenger – b'ger's step-by-step of converting gif-to-asciiAscii Graphical Techniques by Rowan CrawfordASCIItech – 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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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
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| 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
