I do not know for you but 2 of my hobbies or 2 of the things I spend most of my time doing, are typing on a computer and looking at, reading, writing or producing art so the so call ASCII art could just be the form of art I have been looking for.

ASCII art?

ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII).

Long story short – they are numbers, letter and characters.

What is remarkable about this art, beyond the fact that serious artists out there produce stunning pieces, is that, one of the main reasons behind the emergence of this technique, was because early printers often lacked graphics ability and thus characters were used in place of graphic marks (pixels will then take over printing).

Let your creativity speaks (and have some patience)

We have included some of the best ASCII art we found on the web. Remarkable right?

Click any picture to start the slideshow and let us know your favourite in the comments below. Ours is the Jack Nicholson one depicting of course a scene and the cover of Stanley Kubrick‘s movie – The Shinning