ASCII art is any sort of pictures or diagrams drawn with the printable characters in the ASCII character set.

It is the most universal computer art form in the world -- every computer system capable of displaying multi-line text can display ASCII art, without needing to have a graphics mode or support a particular graphics file format.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) 7-bit as defined in ISO-646 is a basic set of 128 numbered symbols which almost all kinds of computer can display. -- ascii art archive

i have been making drawings on graphite and vellum, scanning them, and translating them into ascii art by hand back into a graphite drawing. i use the ascii art archive to convert the drawing to characters. i love how this dissipates my lines and abstracts what i was originally drawing. i love standing back a couple of feet or looking at a picture really small on my phone when its been photographed to see how it looks at different sizes and distances. these drawings are calming to me, to make and to look at. i think the readable and basic look of ascii is what makes them this way.

the element of involving the computer and then taking it back out by transferring the text to paper is also interesting to me and removes me from the abstraction process which i like.