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diamondie — Matteo ASCII
Published: 2005-10-19 08:38:13 +0000 UTC; Views: 7092; Favourites: 20; Downloads: 592
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Description
This is my contribution to the Matteo day , in honor of DA's other co-founder °matteo who hasn't got nearly the amount of recognition he deserves. It was his idea, after all, to make DA house all types of art, not just skins. Not many art communities have an own section for ASCII and ANSI art, but DeviantART has, which is one of the main reasons why I joined in the first place. Please only submit gray or pug themed Deviations today. You can also drop a message to °matteo 's user page.This was drawn in JavE and I consider it to be my first attempt at grayscale ASCII (and boy, does it show). I've attempted it with two previous pieces, but I think they should be called cell-shaded solid art or something. I've said that I can't draw, but actually I'm decent at drawing - I just can't paint. Grayscale is most suited to pictures with high contrast. Human faces are good as they have light and shadow and it goes pretty much in gradients. Dogs are a different matter. The result is way too low in contrast, I admit, and doesn't have much texture either.
Finding a good character palette was difficult. The X's and x's are somewhat of an peculiar choice for filler characters and technically I wouldn't need both the x's and s's, but I went for this one. I tried more ordinary choices like %, M and :, but they just didn't look right to me. Most grayscale ASCII is done in Courier New (or similar fonts) or for MS-DOS. This piece uses Fixedsys, because that way I could arrange at least a bit of contrast. Like most grayscale ASCII it looks bad in Lucida Console. It seriously lacks contrast in Courier. In MS-DOS it looks alright, though it's of course a negative image there.
In case you're interested, here are my previous DeviantART themed ASCII pictures:
Jark the ASCII Jedi Amolerouth in ASCII Osmi ASCII for gas13 Fella Halloween style 3viantart P.S. If you suggest that I should use a converter program instead of drawing ASCII by hand, you shall be handled with a LART [1 ].
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Comments: 36
You're one of the best true ASCII artists on deviantART. It's nice to see some greyscale work that doesn't look as if it were run through one of those ASCII filters.
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Thanks a lot for those compliments. Personally I don't think I'm that good at grayscale, eg. ~jSepia and `nemoorange are much better, and their works don't look like conversions either. But I've drawn hundreds of lineart and solid pieces and only a handful of grayscale ones, so maybe I should practice it again.
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I`ve seen other dwawings with such detail, like one of mr Spock.
Are those yours too??
Very good detailed!!
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No, this is the first real "grayscale" ASCII picture I've drawn. I'm not nearly as good at it as many other people are, eg. ~jSepia and `nemoorange , but I'm hoping to draw some more grayscale in the future.
Thanks for the comments!
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O_O
Omg, I just love ASCII sooo much (probably because I could never-ever make something like a heart even if I tried 
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Very impressive. an ASCIIer and a pixeller. who could be more oldschool?
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Well done. It's good to see there are still practioners of the ancient arts.
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I like greyscales and pugs, win win for this picture!
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its funny how ASCI looks better in the preview.
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wow, thats too cool, i cant imagine even being able to THINK of how to do this, you should be proud of yourself!!
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Brilliant work. Now i know what to call this sort of art exactly
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Amazing what you can do with letters!! You draw your writting
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This is impressive work! It amazes me how you can arrange these symbols to create shadow and light. It must take a lot of patience and practice to get a result like this. Not to mention the talent to see "where" to place "what" symbol to create the desired effect. Looks like a giant puzzle from my point of view, but with an impressive end result.
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Thanks. I use the program JavE , but you could as well use a normal text editor like Notepad. I found a good stock photo from stock.xchng , upped the contrast in PSP and used it as a reference photo. The use of different characters for different shades was largely experimental, as I've concentrated on different kinds of ASCII art before.
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Good work, especially considering that it's so hard to create proper shading in Fixedsys. You did a great job with the folds in the skin, and the dark parts of the face. Just the eyes were a little hard to figure out, because of the blank highlights. I thought you didn't like the idea of using '+' to shade large areas, probably something lighter ( : , for example) would have been better.
It's inspiring to see how you keep trying new techniques and styles despite your 8 years of experience. For example, going hi-res; unlike your other ASCIIs, this one required a few steps back from my monitor. I wonder what will come next.
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Thanks. I don't think it was too hard to shade in Fixedsys, it offers a wide variety of contrast unlike some fonts. I settled for the + because no other character gave me satisfactory results, colons just didn't cut it. I wanted the characters to fit together and + seemed to go well with the x due to their similar shapes.
I didn't really think of this picture as "hi-res", it wasn't intentional. But it's true that the picture looks very good in thumbnail size or slightly bigger, but I don't like the full resolution that much, which is somewhat of a shame since I tend to think one should view ASCII art with the individual characters visible.
My next ASCII will probably be just a logo request. I don't have any idea what will come after that, though I think I'll be continuing with grayscale some time in the near future.
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wow! excellent diamondie. i really like how you have used $ S s and X x +, kind of a subtle way to define shading without making it too noticable. your anti-aliasing couldnt be more perfect!
great work
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Awww...that's so sweet of you to do something for ! Sorry for not being able to critique properly, since I do not know much about ASCII or ANSI art, even though you have kindly shown me some images made by those who use those programs. Anyway, 
~
~Reb29
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While the contrast is rather low, I suspect it's symptomatic of the medium. In any given mono-spaced font, there's going to be a certain amount of space not just around each character, but within as well. I doubt you could get much more than a 50% dot (to use a printing analogy) so you'd either have to intentionally over-contrast the image or, as you've mentioned, find something with that level of contrast inherent in it. Over-contrasting would be difficult to do without producing banding, especially if your source image is fairly flat to begin with, as this appears to be. Given the technical difficulties involved, I think you've managed quite a good piece.
As usual, your anti-aliasing is impeccable, and you've even managed to create what appears to be a slightly feathered edge along the left side, where the dog is backlit. The only part that stands out as being not quite right is the little fold of skin just under the muzzle on the right. Somehow the edge seems a bit too pronounced. Maybe the final : could be replaced with a . to soften it a touch? Caveat: I'm no ascii artist, so you're free to tell me to fuck off and keep my opinions to myself.
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Well, it's possible to create grayscale ASCII art with very high contrast, as you can always use empty spaces and very light characters, such as punctuation characters. But this is hard to do if the subject in question isn't already high in contrast or possible to turn into a high-contrast image without looking silly. Faces often look good in high-contrast, but you just can't get a dog to look the same way. Dalmatians are a different thing, but due to the lack of gradients they're probably more suitable for solid ASCII than grayscale. That said, I'll try to draw a Dalmatian some day.
The feathered edge wasn't intentional, but now that you mention it I can see it that way. The fold of the skin was originally wider (the way it was in my reference photo), but I thought it looked exaggerated and removed the right-most character.
Your opinions and those things you've pointed out are certainly insightful and make a lot of sense. It's always good to hear some thoughts "outside of the genre".
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SHEESH! i can't imagine how long it must have taken you to figure all of that out. It is really cute!!
And the dog is a cutie too.....Wow...impressive work!
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these things give me the most horrible headaches to look at xD thats a lot of work though oO;
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Amazing! In low resolution it looks just like a black and white photograph.
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