Key Takeaways ASCII Art Paint is simple to use, allows drawing in ASCII, and offers an easy way to save designs directly as TXT files. REXPaint is a more advanced tool with color palettes and layers, providing the ability to create more complex ASCII art. ChatGPT 4o by OpenAI is surprisingly good at generating ASCII designs, providing quick ideation and doodles, despite generative AI limitations.
ASCII is an almost 60-year-old art style that's still alive today. Back then you had to create it by hand. But now you can easily convert regular images into ASCII code or just ask AI chatbots to generate ASCII designs from simple prompts.
Before we get into the different ways of quickly generating ASCII designs, I want to show you how you can draw your own ASCII art.
ASCII Art Paint
ASCII Art Paint is a charming little tool for drawing in ASCII. It has a clean and intuitive interface. It has a canvas grid that auto-resizes as you draw. You can select from an almost unending list of symbols and characters (clicking Edit Symbol Palette expands available characters). You can use it in light or dark mode.
Once you've picked your font and symbol, you can select the pencil tool and draw it across the canvas (with a mouse or stylus) to make your marks. You can create outlines and quickly fill them with the paint bucket tool (which fills a bounded area with the selected character). The toolbar also has a hand tool for moving around the canvas, an eyedropper for picking a character, and an eraser for cleaning up. When you're done, you can save it directly as a TXT file.You can even use it directly in your browser.
Doodling in ASCII Art Paint reminded me of my first experience with Microsoft Paint!
REXPaint
REXPaint is a little more powerful than ASCII Art Paint. It has advanced features like a color palette, shapes, and layers. It makes it a lot easier to draw complex marks with better precision. At first glance, it's not as intuitive as ASCII Art Paint, but the learning curve isn't that steep. Here's my masterpiece.
And here's a showcase of ASCII art some amazingly talented people have made using REXPaint.
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REXPaint is only available for Windows. And you can download it from the official website.
Two Ways to Turn Your Pictures or Graphics into ASCII Art
Instead of drawing ASCII art, you can also convert your pictures and graphics into ASCII format too. Web apps are the easiest to work with because you don't install anything to get started, and they return pretty good results. There are also command-line and desktop apps that do the job, but the options are more limited.
Converting Images to ASCII in the Browser
Tools like ImgASCII make it effortless to create an ASCII representation of any image or graphic. You just have to upload the file from your computer, and they return the ASCII text in one click.
Alternatively, if you only need to write something in fancy ASCII, you can just type your text in (TAAG) and it'll instantly turn into ASCII.
Convert to ASCII On Your Computer
If you have to convert to ASCII often or if you're working with a big batch of files, it makes most sense to just install a handy tool on your PC and convert offline. To my surprise, there aren't a lot of good Windows apps that can do this job. I tested a few and most of them felt buggy and unpolished. ASCIFY Art and Img2ASCII are two apps I would steer clear of. However, I can recommend ASCII Generator 2 (AKA AscGen 2).
ASCII Generator 2 is freeware that you can download from Sourceforge or the AscGen2 website. It doesn't need installation, you can just run it from the zip file. Open the archive and double-click the EXE file. It'll launch a neat little interface with two windows: one window is where you load your source file and the other where the ASCII output is generated.
Double-click the small window to open the source file, or click File > Load Image on the menu tab.
The ASCII output should be auto-generated instantly. You can tweak the brightness, contrast, and dither settings to make the output just perfect. Or you can change the font, font size, invert the colors, sharpen the text output, or modify which characters make up the ASCII output.
When you're done, either select-and-copy the ASCII text or go to File > Save As and click "OK." The window also lets you save the output as an image or text in color or black and white.
Generate ASCII Art with AI
Before we get into making ASCII art with AI, there's a big caveat you should know. Generative AI is not that great at handling ASCII. Most models are just hilariously bad at it. I asked ChatGPT 3.5 and Claude to draw some simple ASCII designs for me.
This is ChatGPT's attempt at a unicorn.
And here's one of a hand, with a second "more detailed" version.
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It does relatively okay with certain common prompts like "cat" or "car." Most of the time, the results are unusable. While digging into it, I found out it's because generative AI works by predicting where to place the next character. This doesn't really lend itself to drawing pictures.
ChatGPT 4o is surprisingly good at ASCII though. OpenAI gives a few free prompts with ChatGPT 4o, but you can get more access for free too.
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There's not much to explain in the way of technicalities. You can just use ChatGPT 4o to draw an ASCII representation of whatever you want. If it comes out right, you can ask it to modify the output or add more detail. AI doesn't give you the same level of control as the other tools on this list. But it's good for quick ideation and doodles.
Some Pro Tips
Picking the right tool for the right job can make a huge difference when you're working with ASCII. If you're just doodling, go with the online ASCII Art Paint tool. Serious artists trying to make pro art and hone their skills should try REXPaint. LvlLvl deserves an honorable mention here. It's basically the ASCII version of Photoshop, but it's still in Alpha, so it didn't make the list.
Web tools are fine for converting to ASCII most of the time. But if you need to run batch jobs, ASCII Generator 2 is your friend. You can also edit the images before running them through the generator. Images with good contrast and high-resolution tend to do better in my experience.
ASCII generated by AI is still in the early stages, but you will get the best results with ChatGPT 4o (at least at the time of this writing).
That's every way you can get started with ASCII today. If you try any of these tools to make your ASCII art, do share it with us in the comments below!