ASCII Art - A Quick How-to and Know-how

For those wondering, what ASCII art is, let me show you.

A lovely Barn Owl by me

See how it's made up of numbers and letters and such? Those are ASCII characters. With ASCII art, a general rule of thumb is that if you want to see the picture better, get further away from it. More complex pictures will be bigger, using more characters.

There are different ways to go about creating said art. You can sit for many hours and type out a masterpiece, or you can be lazy and make a program that does it for you!

Being a huge nerd can take you from this

To this!

So making the pictures is one thing, but what if we wanted to do more with them? What if we wanted them to move? Well, we can do that! It's just going to require some work. 

First, we need to know what we want to animate. For this, I'm going to use another thing from Steven Universe

So we have our short clip picked out. Next, we need to turn that clip into a series of stills to turn into ASCII masterpieces. Each one is going to be a frame of our finished product. I ended up breaking this clip into 18 frames. I then took each of the new ASCII pictures and compiled them into a gif.

The timing needs a little work, but there we have it! Animated ASCII! I would love to make some kind of plugin that converts frames to ASCII to be able to do this in an even lazier fashion, but that's a dream for the future.