How to Make ASCII Art

You need only a monospace font and a place to type it. Which method suits you depends on whether you want to draw, convert or generate.

How to make ASCII art in four ways

Each method starts from the same rule: every character takes the same width, so the picture only holds together in a monospace font.

How do you draw ASCII art by hand?

1. Open a plain text editor and set a monospace font such as Consolas, Menlo or DejaVu Sans Mono. Turn off word wrap.
2. Block out the shape with one character, for example #, as if colouring squares on graph paper. Remember that each cell is about twice as tall as it is wide.
3. Refine the edges. Replace the outline with characters that follow its angle: / and \ for diagonals, | for uprights, _ for flat bottoms, - for flat tops, ( and ) for curves, ' and . for the tops and bottoms of curves.
4. Add details last: eyes (o, O, ^), noses (v, Y), whiskers (> <).
5. Check every line by pasting into a code block. Trailing spaces don’t matter; leading spaces do.

How do you turn words into big ASCII letters?

Type into the ASCII art generator, choose a FIGlet font and copy. For a terminal, the same fonts are available offline: figlet and toilet are in most Linux package managers and Homebrew, and figlet -f slant Hello prints Hello in the Slant font.

How do you convert a picture to ASCII art?

Use the image to ASCII converter. It shrinks the picture to a grid, measures how dark each cell is and picks a character with matching ink, or switches to Braille dots for finer detail. Silhouettes and high-contrast photos convert best; busy photos turn to noise.

How do you generate ASCII art with code?

The idea behind every converter fits in a few lines of Python with the Pillow library:

from PIL import Image

RAMP = "@%#*+=-:. "            # dark to light
img = Image.open("cat.png").convert("L")
cols = 60
rows = int(cols * img.height / img.width * 0.5)   # cells are about twice as tall as wide
img = img.resize((cols, rows))
for y in range(rows):
    print("".join(RAMP[img.getpixel((x, y)) * len(RAMP) // 256] for x in range(cols)))

For text banners in Python, the pyfiglet package uses the same FIGlet fonts.

What mistakes break ASCII art?

• Pasting into a proportional font. Use a code block, terminal or monospace document.
• Tabs. Editors show tabs at different widths. Convert tabs to spaces.
• Automatic formatting. Markdown turns *text* into italics and lines of dashes into rules; chat apps turn :) into emoji. Code blocks prevent both.
• Wide characters. Emoji and Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters take two columns and push everything after them out of line.

Once you know how to make ASCII art, learn from ready-made pieces by browsing the ASCII art galleries, and read what ASCII art is for its history.