Album: ASCII Art
Creator: me.

It may be debatable if ASCII art is really art per se, but there's certainly both an art and a science involved in creating it. There was some interest in ASCII art I had posted previously, so I figured I'd post a larger gallery and more information about creating it.

To make this work for mobile users and allow for the use of color, these are actually PNGs in the previously linked album for your convenience. (an example of a post with actual text is here)

What you'll find in that album is a mix of images from different sources, rendered at various sizes, with and without color. These are generally all from cropped screencaps. (which can be found in my other linked albums)

Some tips if making your own:

1. In general, simple images with less dynamic range and flat shading convert the best, but fortunately these are very common in anime.

2. The converter used makes a tremendous difference; this is an example of one of the first I tried. Yikes.

3. For the final converter, I found results were significantly more accurate in representing both shading and higher-frequency boundaries within the image if a higher-resolution source image was used.

4. Other converters worked best with lower-resolution images, and some form of edge enhancement applied.

5. Results were improved when the source image was low resolution by using a pixel art scaler (xBRZ) to upscale it.

6. One of the most difficult areas to get right without color is the eyes. For facial profiles, I would suggest using as small of a crop as possible. You may also want to increase the default max white value to provide a shading difference between the face and eyes, but beware of this compromising facial details.

7. The final converter used is relatively slow, and only uses one CPU core, so if working on multiple images I would suggest working with multiple tabs open.

8. Use your dark powers responsibly; ASCII art is ultimately a wall of text, and a link to an actual JPEG or PNG will usually work better.

If there is interest I can post the actual text contents of any of those images, but note the maximum width on Reddit is about 110 columns best-case, and about 70 columns for mobile and/or the sidebar.

Hey guys,

Just wanted to make a quick request for some cool anime ascii that people may have on their profile, or just generally know of. I can't seem to find any that work on my profile without looking weird and distorted.

Just post the ascii or the user's account, it would help a lot.

I hope you have a great day/night! Thanks, Des.