The first step towards creating this tool was when I tried creating a relative big ASCII work with white pencils on black paper (50cm x 75cm).
Having drawn all the symbols by hand, the idea popped up to create a tool to automatically generate big resolution designs based on an initial image.
This way the results are printable and can be used as wall decorations. I personally really like the printed results on brushed aluminum. All the white elements have a metallic look and it really adds towards an industrial effect.
With the first results ready, I started to further tweak the tools, so I could finetune the output at runtime before creating a final image.
When all of this worked, I added the feature to add extra colors. Based on the RGBA channel, it is now possible to give certain channel values a custom color.
As a last update, I experimented with this new color feature to create an animated ASCII GIF. I split up a GIF-render into seperate frames. For each frame of the animation, I generated a colored ASCII version and combined them into a GIF again.
To finalize this concept, I also created a visualization workflow to render the output on a digital frame with a background. That way you can see the result digitally before making the print.
Below you can see some screenshots and outputs of these experiments.
If interested in a personalized ASCII work, feel free to contact me via the contact form on the home page.
