Re: TALK: How To Draw Ascii Art.

Row:
>Here's something I've been working on for quite a while now. It's my
>attempt at a "how to draw ascii art" FAQ, although in reality it's
>just an analysis of my style, so isn't a "be all, end all".

It was well done and very interesting.

I've been thinking about something related: how to break down ascii
art techniques in general.  This is what I've come up with so far.

There are two major divisions: Limitations and Possibilities.

Limitations:

L1.  The grid.  Since ascii text is confined to a grid, a lot of ascii
art uses some sort of "pixellation" technique.  The simplest version
uses just one character, like X, as an "on" pixel, to make pictures
similar to black-and-white bitmaps.  Some of the snoopy pictures are
like this.  Other pictures, like many gif conversions, use several
different characters to approximate grayscale.

L2. The characters.  The shape of the ascii characters is pretty
fundamental to much ascii art.  Small art in particular, like the
smilies and most sig-sized art, relies heavily on this.

Possibilities:

P1. Thin lines.  Thin lines are those drawn with | \ - / etc, anything
with a width smaller than the grid width.

P2. Thick lines and boundaries.  These are lines that are thicker than
the grid width, like 8888 or aaaa lines.  This is also concerned with
the shape of the boundary between filled and non-filled regions.
"Anti-aliasing" like ,ad88ba, is one common technique.

P3. Texture and shade.  This is the use of patterns and non-patterns
to fill regions and put tone in a picture.

Hmm.  A category like 3-d art doesn't belong anywhere in this.  I
think it probably belongs in a third major division, Forms.  3-d,
cartoons, animation, etc, are different forms.

And I guess this makes a type of hierarchy: forms are built on
possibilities, possibilities are built on limitations.

Does all this make sense?
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