My latest obsession is ASCII text art, or basically art made from letters and characters. I’ve been playing with this quite a bit in my downtime and find this use of text as an art medium quite fascinating. I bet several graf writers could prolly rock stuff with text, and I think this art form could be applied towards some kind of underground text/picture communication tool.

A lot of folks do this of all ages. Here is a link to text artist Paul Smith who has cerebral palsy and makes pictures with his typewriter. It says on his bio page that “When typing, Paul uses his left hand to steady his right one. Since he can’t press two keys at the same time, he almost always locks the shift key down and makes his pictures using the symbols at the top of the number keys. In other words, his pictures are based on these characters … @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ .” Pretty amazing once you see his stuff and look at the “type work” up close. Chris Johnson has some great stuff on his site too. His stuff is more modern and is really tightly done.