Painting with blocks: the ANSI art scene

You didn't need a graphics card capable of millions of colours to make a computer screen look spectacular. On a DOS-era BBS, a skilled ANSI artist could work within a small palette and a grid of character cells to build elaborate illustrations: dragons, chrome letterforms, cityscapes, logos, portraits and entire interfaces.

The visual ingredients were simple. A terminal could display text characters from the IBM PC character set, commonly known as Code Page 437, including solid blocks, half blocks, shading patterns and box-drawing shapes. ANSI escape sequences controlled colours and cursor position. Carefully placed characters became pixels in a larger composition.

Sixteen colours, many tricks

The familiar PC text palette included colours such as blue, cyan, red, magenta, yellow and green, with brighter variants and contrasting backgrounds. Artists exploited foreground and background combinations to produce more apparent detail than one might expect from text. Shading characters like ░, ▒ and ▓ could approximate tones, while █ and ▀ created hard-edged shapes.

Many ANSI works assumed a conventional text width of 80 columns, although the number of lines visible at once varied by terminal and configuration. Viewers often watched the art draw down the screen over a comparatively slow modem connection. Its dramatic arrival was part of the experience.

The artists and their packs

By the early 1990s, a lively artscene had formed around digital art distributed through bulletin boards. Groups such as ACiD and iCE became well known for releasing collections of work, commonly packaged as compressed archives. New pieces appeared in login screens, file-section banners, advertisements and group releases. The scene developed identities, rivalries and an astonishing range of styles.

Programs such as TheDraw made composing colourful text art more practical. An ANSI artist could work much like a pixel artist, except with a rigid grid of character cells and text-mode colour constraints.

What survives of the culture?

The language remains visible in terminal-based interfaces, NFO files, text art communities, demos and online ANSI editors. Viewing original material correctly still matters: a modern Unicode font may not precisely match the shapes and proportions of an IBM-era CP437 display, and some art relies on exact widths and blinking behaviour.

When preserving an original ANSI screen, note the author and source if known. Do not assume that vintage art is copyright-free. For new work, create your own designs inspired by the vocabulary of the medium rather than copying archived artists' work.