Tag: Grid

by David Burgess on November 19, 2022 0

How To Take Better Photos With Your Samsung Galaxy Camera 2

The Samsung Galaxy Camera 2 is a powerful device that can do a lot more than just take pictures. With its built-in Android operating system, the Galaxy Camera 2 gives you full access to the Google Play store and all of its apps.

Use the rule of thirds

When you’re framing a photo, it’s important to consider the rule of thirds. This rule is a guideline that suggests you should position the main subject of your photo either to the left or right of the frame, or above or below the center. This creates a more visually interesting and balanced photo.

To use the rule of thirds with your Samsung Galaxy Camera 2, simply tap the grid icon in the top left corner of the camera app. This will overlay a 3×3 grid on your camera’s display, making it easy to align your subject with one of the intersections.

Use the Selfie Alarm

The Samsung Galaxy Camera 2 has a great feature called the Selfie Alarm, which is perfect for taking group shots or selfies. To use the Selfie Alarm, open the camera app and tap the timer icon in the top right corner. Then, tap the Selfie Alarm icon and choose how long you want the timer to be (3, 5, or 10 seconds).

When you’re ready to take the photo, simply tap the shutter button and the camera will countdown from the selected time. This gives you enough time to get into position before the photo is taken.

Use burst mode

Burst mode is a great way to capture fast-moving subjects, like kids or pets. To use burst mode, open the camera app and tap the burst mode icon (it looks like a stack of three arrows). Then, simply hold down the shutter button and the camera will take a series of photos in quick succession.

Use the panorama mode

The panorama mode is perfect for capturing sweeping landscapes or large groups of people. To use the panorama mode, open the camera app and tap the panorama mode icon (it looks like a mountain). Then, simply press the shutter button and pan the camera slowly from left to right. The camera will automatically stitch the photos together to create a panoramic image.

Use the night mode

The night mode is perfect for taking photos in low-light conditions, like at a concert or in a bar. To use the night mode, open the camera app and tap the night mode icon (it looks like a moon). Then, simply press the shutter button and the camera will take a series of photos and automatically stitch them together to create a low-light image.

Use the HDR mode

The HDR (high dynamic range) mode is perfect for taking photos with a lot of contrast, like a photo of a sunset. To use the HDR mode, open the camera app and tap the HDR icon (it looks like a sun). Then, simply press the shutter button and the camera will take two photos with different exposures and automatically stitch them together to create a high-contrast image.

Use the macro mode

The macro mode is perfect for taking close-up photos of small subjects, like flowers or insects. To use the macro mode, open the camera app and tap the macro icon (it looks like a flower). Then, simply press the shutter button and the camera will focus on the subject in the center of the frame.

Use the food mode

The food mode is perfect for taking photos of, you guessed it, food! To use the food mode, open the camera app and tap the food icon (it looks like a fork and knife). Then, simply press the shutter button and the camera will take a photo with enhanced colors and saturation.

Use the sports mode

The sports mode is perfect for taking photos of fast-moving subjects, like a runner or a car. To use the sports mode, open the camera app and tap the sports icon (it looks like a running person). Then, simply press the shutter button and the camera will take a series of photos and automatically stitch them together to create a action-packed image.

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by David Burgess on May 10, 2018 0

How to draw deciduous trees

Tips on how to draw deciduous trees

This is an introduction to drawing deciduous trees in a realistic way from life. This site explains how to draw deciduous trees with a pen and with charcoal. If your looking for some inspirations or ideas for tree drawing have a look here.

The website discusses the main features of deciduous trees and how to draw them. First simple drawings point out to the basic proportions and parts of a tree. Then tree trunk, branches and tree tops are explained further. Examples and methods how to represent bark and foliage of trees in drawings are given. Finally the making of a very detailed ink drawing of an apple tree orchard is demonstrated in a sequence of intermediate states. Herre you can see the process of drawing step by step.

Let´s try to draw some simple apple trees !

A tutorial for beginners
In the beginning a simple four step approach to drawing trees with pen or ink might help.

In order not to get overwhelmed by the many details of a tree I commend to begin with studies from a distance.
First try to depict the shape or outline of trunk and tree top.

In a second step larger internal forms in the tree top are mapped. The confusing pattern of leaves in fact follows a certain order and on observation one can see that the leaves are organised in typical “groups” following the branch and twig structure of the specific tree species.

In a third step the larger forms can be described further by filling them with a typical smallpattern that the leaves are forming.
I a final fourth step one might add hatches to add shadows, thus the drawing gains more three dimensional look.

No.1 : Starting with the trunk

After the outer form was established I continued with drawing the trunk and then continued to represent the foliage in shade on the right side of the trunk in small circular movements with the pen.
Later the hatching was added for the shadows on the trunk and for the darker tonality in the shadowed area.

The trunk of a tree is a very interesting subject for further exploration. The ink drawing below shows the stem of an old apple tree.

No.2 Mapping the tree tops

detailed view of line pattern
The foliage of trees shows, depending on light, lots of different shades or tonalities. By squinting I identified darker and light areas or clusters of twigs with foliage that have different tonality. Then I try to map the borderlines between darker and the lighter areas by blind drawing.. With some experience you will notice that eqach tree species has a specific “organisation” of branches and twigs and therefore shows a typical pattern of leaves which are grouped by the twigs and branches. So the method here is to establish the bigger forms first and then proceed to the next lower level in the hierarchy.

No.3 Patterns of leaves and foliage

round or jagged outlines?
Each tree species has it´s own pattern or rythm of leaves. I tried to imitate the rythm I saw with my pen movements. The leaves seemed to be arranged a bit like little roof tiles. Also it makes a big difference whether the leaves have rounded edges like on fruit trees or more sharp distinct edges like a red oak or a maple tree. Jagged leaf outlines should be represented by a pattern of jagged lines if the natural character of the tree shall be displayed in the drawing.
With light or heavier pressure on the pen I tried to create thinner/lighter or thicker darker foliage.

How to draw foliage in tree tops

This sketchbook drawing shows a group of apple trees. In the detail below it can be seen how I tried to represent the variations tonalities in the foliage. A realistic impression can be achieved by putting emphasize on the outer branches and leaves of the tree tops and drawing them in very dark tonality. Leaves and twigs at the very tree top often seem to look very dark or almost black in contrast the bright sky. As soon as you move your eyes downwards from the very tree top the foliage seems to get lighter and colors become more visible, because the bright sky does not dazzle the eyes so much.

Apple tree orchard – tree drawing in ink

Development of a landscape drawing with trees
apple trees with ink drawing on site, plein air With more experience the draughtsman develops a strong feel for proportions and an excellent eye to hand co-ordination. The masters seem to know already how the finsished drawing will look on paper and all they need to do is to put it down with their drawing tool. I have not come that far yet, but meantime I can estimate proportions fairly well and I find myself starting a drawing without establishing the outlines visibly on paper first.

See here an example of a detailed landscape study, an apple tree orchard. I have documented the progress of the drawing on several subsequent days. I avoided cross hatching with purpose in this drawing as cross hatchings tend to obscure details and thus reduce the clarity of a drawing. Of course sometimes that can be a wanted effect too.

ink drawing apple tree orchard

I started the drawing with the base of the important tree trunk on the left and then proceeded further to the other more distant trunks and finally into the branches and tree tops. The tree trunks functioned as basic grid and reference for proportions and spatial order. Working all over the page helps to keep the drawing coherent and to make the right decisions about gradadtions of tonalities too. The best is to know from the very start which parts of the drawing shall be the lightest ones and which ones should be the darkest.

In the decidous forest – a charcoal drawing

Oak and beech forest in spring,strategies to deal with an abundance of detail.
The drawing on the right was done on site very near to my home. It shows a beech and oak forest in late spring. I remember those big leaves of Coltsfoots that bloom early along those machine path prepared for logging of timber. You can see those leaves in the foreground on the left.

I found the best way to adopt to the overwhelming amount of details in a forest scenery is to examine the subject before starting with the drawing. I decided to built the picture around the bright spot where the sun hits the grass. It was that light that attracted me to choose that subject.
The big trunks and some smaller ones established the composition grid in this drawing. I start with light marks and lines because mistakes can be wiped out with a cloth easily and the darkest darks should be placed at the end with consideration. The darkest and the lightest spots in a drawing attract the viewer eyes like strong magnets. Wrong placement, wrong form of those “highlights” can spoil the most beautiful drawing. In order to pull the viewer into the picture I placed the sunlit spot of grass at the end of the over grown path in the very center of the paper. To enhance the brightness I placed the darkest darks around the bright spot, which seems brighter than the blank paper in the sky or the foreground.

After the vertical grid was established I concentrated on typical structures of foliage and shrubs and added the background, which filled the spaces between tree trunks. I used a soft eraser to recover some lights in the background to imitate the impresionj that the pattern of light spots on the leaves evoke. To improve that illusion I added dark small marks that resemble the form of leaves.

Finally the foreground was put in. Instead of trying the impossible, to copy each and every grass or leave, I concentrated to represent samples of some of the typical forms and structures I saw. After all the drawing is a simplification of the real scenery, that is just detailed enough to keep up the illusion.

How to draw a tree – The book published on BLURB

A field guide to sketching and drawing trees

70 black and white images of pen, ink and charcoal drawings. You will find many of the illustrations on this lens, but others also from related lenses on drawing deciduous and coniferous trees and some extra images too in the book.
The book summarizes my experiences in drawing trees. The majority of drawings are deciduous trees, but there is also an explanations about pine tree drwaing and spruce.

Link to the book How to draw a tree There is a full preview available.

Quick tree sketch with charcoal

One day a thunderstorm surprised me when drawing. Quickly I seeked cover under a bridge and made a quick drawing of young trees in a rain shower

A look to the edge of a forest

Drawing a forest with pen
This sketchbook drawing was part of an exhibiton project “A year in the vine yard”.
The full sketchbook can be seen here “A year in the vine yard”
Study of a willow tree
Ink drawing in four stages
drawing of a willow tree in four stages

This ink drawing was done in several short session of 20-30 minutes due to cold winter temperatures. The depiction of the many think twiges at the top of the willow tree was a challenge. Not all of those visible in reality found their way into the drawing. More than ofteb less is more in drawing.

Drawing the urban landscape – publication on Blurb

Exploring the city with pen and sketchbook

Between April 2006 and May 2007 I have

worked on an exhibition project about the urban landscape of the city of Stuttgart,Germany.
I have selected more than 30 drawings for a book now available online at BLURB.
The first 10 pages show panoramic drawings together with the essay about the urban landscape and the experience of drawing such a complex subject. The following pages show two panoramic drawings per page without text.

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by David Burgess on May 10, 2018 0

How to Draw by Joy: Baby’s Portrait

Step by step baby portrait pencil drawing

I am presently working on drawing this little one at two years old in a illustrations for a children’s book I am creating. Two of the illustrations are included on this drawing tutorial below.

This is a free drawing tutorial by Joy. Pencil drawing is a skill, that to a degree, can be learned. Of course it helps if you have an eye for it, and a creative streak within you. However, the skill of drawing can be learned by anyone with the determination and discipline to practice.

Through drawing, I have improved my photography by learning to see the world around me differently. I have also learned to think “out of the box” and pay attention to the story being told with the drawings and the photos. This seemed to come once I did not have to focus on technique so much. After a while I have become comfortable knowing what to expect out of the pencils and other supplies used in drawing, and I do not have to put effort into trying to get them to do what I want them to do. Now, I seem to be able to focus more on the composition and seeing what I am drawing differently.

I hope you enjoy this tutorial. I have many others with various drawing subjects for you to explore when you are ready.

More Portrait Drawing by Joy

“I Am Fearfully and Wonderfully Made” portrait drawing (Aug. 13, 2012)

I am presently working on writing and illustrating a children’s book. Here is the progress on the first illustration. Just click on the photo to go to “I am my Father’s Child” Squidoo lens to see more illustrations the children’s book I am working on creating.

By the way, this little girl is the baby in the drawing. She is now 2 !/2 years old.

Finished….updated portrait of same child as in baby drawing. – August 14, 2012

Where to begin drawing your baby portrait…

Personally, I began by looking up portraits that I considered well drawn on the internet and took a look the artists who drew them, there styles, the materials they tend to use, and if they had a tutorial on their website, I read it. Some of these included: J D Hillberry, Lee Hammond, Remi Engles, and Diane Cardaci. After studying this for a few days, I gathered my supplies, and began.

Here is a list of supplies I used: graphite pencils (F, 2B, B, mechanical .7mm 2B, mechanical .5mm HB), charcoal pencil (soft, medium), a carbon pencil, tortillions (various sizes), a gummy eraser, a typewriter eraser, a scanner/printer, photopaper (to print the reference photos), strathmoore 300 Bristol (smooth) paper, a sheet of tracing paper to keep over the drawing in progress so that it does not smudge (I tend to need to protect my drawings as I travel and draw at the same time). Most of these products can be purchased at your local hobby store or amazon.com.

Essential Drawing and Sketching supplies:

Here are my favorite basic supplies for pen and ink, graphite, charcoal, and carbon pencil drawing and sketching.

Step 1:
Reference photos and grid

A good reference photo without any blurring is essential. Once obtained, scan it into your computer. Crop it to the portion of the photo that you will be drawing. Print it out in a size that you can easily see well. Next, determine the size of the portrait you will draw. A good size to start is 8″ by 8″ or 8″ by 10″. Once you have practiced a while, drawing larger portraits will not be such a challenge.

After the final portrait drawing size is determined, print out a black and white (grayscale) of the reference photo at the same size you will be drawing.

On the black and white reference photo, draw a 1″ by 1″ grid directly on the reference photo. And, then draw the same grid very lightly with the F graphite pencil on the bristol paper.

From here, begin drawing just the outline of the reference photo, square by square onto the grid. Occasional step back and look at the line drawing as a whole, but for the most part you will draw what you see one square at a time. Draw in only an outline of the reference photo, and do not include detail. If there are major areas of shading or highlights, then dot them in lightly. Here is an example of what I did.

Step 2:

I am left-handed, so I usually begin in the upper right corner of the drawing. This is very important, because you do not want to smudge the drawing with your hands as your progress over the portrait. If you are right-hand, then choose the upper left side of the drawing to begin. I use the black and white reference photo under my hand to prevent smudging my line drawing.

I begin using my graphite pencils here and start shading using the tortillons of various sizes. To figure out where to shade, I pay close attention to the black and white reference photo. There are shading techniques that you can learn from tutorials of the above named artists on their websites or books they have written. If you pay very close attention to the details of the shading on the black and white reference photo, and play around with your totillions and pencils on a scratch paper as you go, you will develop your own technique of achieving the shading in the photo.

Step 3:
The hand and arm…

This proved to be the hardest part of the drawing for me. I had to learn not to draw lines to create the arm and hand. This one is not perfect, I still have work on developing my ability to draw this portion of the portrait. I did learn that I can kind of dot in the hand outline and use shading to bring it out. I closely followed the shading in the black and white reference photo (paying very close attention to each square of the grid, one square at a time). I drew mostly with the toritillions, not the pencil. I would just rub the end of the tortillion on the charcoal pencil and use it to shade according to the reference photo.
My Favorite Essential books for Drawing

In my opinion, anyone who loves drawing should have a copy of these books on their reference shelf. They are full of inspirational ideas and skills to enhance your own drawing performance.

Step 4:
hair and forehead

While I moved on to the hair and forehead, I went back to the blanket and arm and hand regularly, adding darkened areas with my charcoal pencil and carbon pencil. Be sure to do this sparingly, a little dark goes a long way :-).

I learned from the above listed artists that the hair must be built up in layers. So I used the F pencil to lay the foundation, making strokes that followed the hair in the reference photo, but also following the shape of the head. I alternated drawing with pencils, blending with tortillions, and drawing with my kneaded easer in hair-like strokes, until it appeared as close to the reference photo as I could get it. I shaded the forehead the same way as I did the hand and the arm, paying close attention to shading under the hairline, and highlights.

I then began to darken in the eyes, keeping in mind that to create a real eye, the eye is round inside the eyelids, and that the eyelids contain several layers to the edges with dots rather than just a solid line.

Step 5:
The nose and ear…

As I draw, I tend to go back a little at a time, fine tuning what I have already done and adding darks and lights to the drawing.

I continued down the face to the nose, paying particular attention to the fact that a nose is primarily shaded onto the face with very few hard lines. These hard lines are created by the shadows under the nose and around the nose rather than drawn in with the pencil. I primarily used a tortillion that I rubbed on the charcoal pencil as I went along.

I also began shading in the ear, paying very close attention to the dark shaded areas to create the lines rather than my drawing them in. I also added the hair over the fingers here, and began adding more detail to the hair and building the layers in it.

Triumphant – August 18, 2012

This one of her was so fun to draw. She has great facial expression. I also used a few new techniques to get the slide to come forward in the drawing.

Step 6:
Ear and Mouth

I am working my way down the face to the mouth now. I left out the bubbles from the reference photo on the mouth and began shading it in. Here I remembered from the artists listed above, that highlights are very important in creating a realistic mouth and also the deeper shading. I also paid close attention to the lines in the mouth begin careful to shade them in rather than draw them in.

The blanket was shaded in next in layers. The first layer was my 2B pencil, held like a wand and shaded in an up and down direction. Blended with a large tortillion, then shaded in with the same wand like method of holding the pencil, but this time in a side to side direction. Again, blended. Leaving the dots white and using a kneaded easer when the shading bled into it. I used the carbon pencil in spots to bring out the edges and shading in the edges. The charcoal pencils was used on the tortillion to shade in the darker folds of the blanket in the foreground.

Step 7:

In the final stage, I finished up the arm at the left bottom side, and went back to adjust the fingers a bit on the hand. I also went back with my carbon pencil and added a little dark here and there, and did the same thing with the typewriter eraser (very lightly) to add highlights here and there. The darks and the lights should be added sparingly. A little goes a long way. I will keep this drawing up on the easel with the reference photos for a while longer. This way as I see it from time to time, I can touch it up a bit here and there. When finished, I will spay with a fixative to keep it from smudging. Then have it framed and matted at a local store.

Don’t forget…

to have fun!!! Drawing a little bit everyday creates drastic improvements in your drawing. Draw what you enjoy. Post it on your own lens or FB and have fun with your drawing.

Joy Neasley — the Missionary and the Artist

I am a missionary and an artist. I was born in East Texas, but left at age 19. Eventually, I settled in Tennessee. Over the years, I have raised two children who now live in Tennessee. Missionary training began at RBTC in Oklahoma in September 2005, with graduation from the missions group after two years in May 2007. Then, after returning to my hometown, Clarksville, TN, I began preparations to head out to Northern China, which took place in May 2008.

Drawing is a new skill which started in Spring 2009. During a time of recuperating from an illness for several months, I found ample time to spend in prayer. Out of that prayer time, I began to draw and write cards for various people, in which, I was led to spend time in prayer. Before I was finished with these cards there were a little over 60 of them. They were very rough sketches, but none-the-less, what I was led to do. Through this process, I realized what He was doing, and I continued to draw and develop this skill, and still continue to grow and develop. These drawings are the result. As I travel through China for my primary purpose of ministry, I draw, creating a visual journal of what I see.

I really enjoy the drawing and the purposes for which God has placed this gift in my life. A whole new door has opened, and I am walking through that door, eagerly awaiting to see where the road beyond it leads.

In mid-May of 2009 I moved into Southern China. I love the people and the ministry work here. I still travel around China and work where needed in association with another ministry here, also. This year, to help share the people I meet with my friends and supporters back home I am working on The 110 Faces of China Drawing Project. I have six of these finished, and working hard to get more finished as time permits. I also have started a blog with regular updates about the people, myself, and the drawings. You can check out this and my blog,” What is it like to be a Missionary Today”, in the links on this Squidoo lens. I also have a Fine Arts America website (linked to this lens) where prints and cards of my drawings and photos are made available to everyone.

Thank you for your prayers and support!

Blessings,

joy neasley

P.S. – if you want to support this ministry, the fastest way is to make an Online Donation via www.WorldOutreach.org. Go to “Donate” and select Joy Neasley – Asia. The system can process USA and International cards. Or simply mail your gift to World Outreach Ministries, PO Box B, Marietta, GA 30061, and designate for Joy Neasley Fund.

Gift of God – July 28, 2012

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by David Burgess on May 10, 2018 0

Foreshortening in the art of drawing

What is foreshortening? Some answers and drawing examples and video tutorial

What is foreshortening? Foreshortening in the arts refers to a specific way to depict three dimensional objects on the two dimensional paper planes. One of the most famous examples of foreshortening in visual arts is the painting by Andrea Mantegna, the mourning of Christ. The painting on wood shows the dead body of Christ from an extreme perspective. The viewer is put on the same eye level as the mourning figures at the side in close distance at the very end of the bed near the feet.

The painting was done in the 15th century in Italy, a period called Renaissance. During that time depiction of three dimensional spaces was fully explored and displayed in visual arts with almost scientific “correctness”.

Foreshortening in this painting means the perspective compression of the body and it’s proportions to a fraction of the actual size. Feet and head come very close together; the limbs are foreshortened in perspective. Mantegna created a stunning and very dynamic piece by choosing this extreme perspective.

Foreshortenings are inseparable connected with the depiction of illusionist three dimensional spaces. Until the 13th century pictures were mostly flat, at least space often was not depicted “correctly” and thus lacked the illusionist effect. Since Mantegna and others renaissance artists drawing and painting foreshortenings has become the standard of illusionist painting.

Andrea Mantegna – the mourning of Christ

An impressive example for foreshortening in visual arts

Image credit: Wiki media commons An impressive example for foreshortening in visual arts

Using a grid to draw foreshortening

The image above is from the 18th century. In the old days using grids in drawing was the state of the art method to produce exact perspective drawings. The draughtsman has a paper with the same grid proportions on his drawing table. All he has to do is to transfer important points where outlines in the scenery cut the vertical grid on the grid on his paper. Then he can connect those points to reproduce the outlines of trees and other objects in the drawing to get an exact flat projection of his view on the drawing paper.

There is a very famous illustration by Albrecht Dürer in his tutorial on how to measure in drawing. It illustrates perfectly how foreshortening in perspective drawings of the human body can be obtained. There is also the vertical grid used to transfer a flat projection of a there dimensional space on the flat surface of the drawing paper.

The effects of foreshortening in drawing

Extreme perspective with foreshortening effect changes a couple fo things. What are the effects of foreshortening in drawing?

1. Foreshortening changes geometric forms: circles will change to elliptic forms, squares will change to rectangles and cylindrical subjects change to a more conical shape for example

2. Foreshortening changes proportions: foreshortening on the human body will change the proportions for example. Parts which are closer to the viewer’s eye can appear much bigger than from a “standard” figure drawing. Limbs might look much shorter, hands or feet might look bigger.

Super retro comic hero thinks about a fly

Video lesson in drawing foreshortening

In this video lesson you can see an example of a manga or cartoon figure stretching the hand directly to the viewer in extreme perspective. As the hand is much closer to the viewer than the body the hand is bigger in size than the head of the figure. This is one of the dynamic effects of an extreme perspective look. The artist shows in real time how he develops the position of hand, palm and fingers in relation to the perspective extremely shortened arm. The video demonstrates the characteristics of foreshortening very well.

Drawing Tutorial: Foreshortening
by markcrilley

Extreme foreshortening as means of a drawing composition

Foreshortening in drawing, charcoal drawing, houses and street

This charcoal drawing of mine (Basic tips for charcoal drawing) uses an extreme perspective with foreshortening as dynamic composition concept. The viewer is massively forced to follow the fence line from the foreground in to a mad dash down the road to the center of the image.

Foreshortening applied in a street sketch

foreshortening in a street sketch
This is a detail of one of my humble sketches of the city of Stuttgart. In the center there are some cars parked and the effect of foreshortening is compressing the outlines of the chassis. It is rather difficult to draw the wheels not as circles but as flat ellipses and the wheel wells so very narrow to shorten the sideview of the vehicle according to the perspective. It helps a lot to close one eye to observe and see the object as it would look as flat projection on paper.

Exercises to learn foreshortening in drawing

One can think of many exercised to learn foreshortening. The first one I did was taken from Bert Dodsons classic book “Key to drawing”. He request the reader to draw is/her own hand with the fingers pointing towards the viewer. It sounds easy but it is a quite tricky thing to do.
Drawing still life subjects like bottles , that are lying flat on a table for example, are also good exercises. Foreshortenings on the human body are a great challenge to

Drawing books that can help to understand foreshortening

In architecture drawing the term foreshortening is rarely used. Foreshortening mostly is mentioned in connection with drawing the human body. Here are two books that deal among others with this topic. especially in comic drawing foreshortening is an often used means to create dynamic and stunning sceneries.

The batman comics are well knwon for their extreme vertiginious perspective views of skyscrapers and the comic hero moving within this environment

Foreshortening in a tree sketch

This sketch is an exercise in drawing foreshortening. The base of old treet trunk pointed towards me. As a result the branches are very close together and the shape of the trunk appears to become a lot thinner from base to top.

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by David Burgess on May 8, 2018 0

ASCII Art

What is ASCII Art?

Text Art has been around long before computers. It predates even typewriters.

ASCII Art is a form of text art. It is named so for the 95 printable characters defined by ASCII.

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, it is a character encoding based on the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text.
Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts, like on a traditional typewriter) such as Courier for presentation.

The ASCII character set

! ” # $ % & ‘ ( ) * + , – . / 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; & l t ; = > ?
@ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [ \ ] ^ _
` a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z { | } ~

Fixed width fonts versus proportionally spaced fonts

Fixed width font: Every character, symbol, and space occupies the exact same width.

Proportionally spaced font: A character’s width is defined by the amount of width needed to display that particular character.

Why are there proportionally spaced fonts?

The letter ‘i’ is, by its very nature, a narrow letter. It doesn’t require much width. The letter ‘m’, on the other hand, is rather wide. One could write three ‘i’s’ in the room it takes to display only one letter ‘m’. When you create a font that is proportionally spaced, it has a tendency to be much more pleasing to the eye.

Why are there fixed width fonts?

There are two reasons.

1. The typewriter. When the typewriter was invented it was, at the time, a fairly advanced piece of mechanical engineering. By pressing keys, a metal arm with an embossed letter would stamp an ink ribbon and produce the image of that letter on a piece of paper. Then the roller assembly that held that piece of paper would move to the left just a bit so the next letter that was typed wouldn’t go over top of the last. Instead it would be positioned just to the right of the previous letter. Since there was no way for it to know which letter was last typed, they had to decide on one fixed amount of space each letter would have. As a result, they had to design the letters in sucFonts with gridlinesh a way that they wouldn’t look silly all having the same amount of width. The letter ‘m’ gets squished and the letter ‘i’ has elongated serifs to make it appear wider.

2. What turned out to be a limitation of the typewriter actually turned out to be a useful tool in the computer age. Early computers did not display graphics. The screen was a grid of characters. The evenly spaced grid also employed a fixed width font. Programmers found this useful because they could plot the exact point on the screen where they wanted their character to appear. Fixed width fonts were employed for this scenario. You can still see this today; just open a DOS window on a Windows PC. A fixed width font will still be displayed. You can change the font used in a DOS window, but it only allows you select from fonts that are fixed width. When the Macintosh introduced the world to the graphical user interface, or GUI, it was no longer necessary to use fixed width fonts. And so was born the explosion of desktop publishing and WYSIWYG.

ASCII Art Links

An ASCII Art portrait of Seth Godin
An ASCII Art portrait of Seth Godin, creator of Squidoo and other amazing keyboard art pages of interesting people, celebrities and others of reknown.

Star Wars: ASCII Art-oo
Recreations of some of the most famous Star Wars ships, in ASCII. By Joe Reiss

Nerd Boy
The Adventures of Nerd Boy. An ASCII comic strip by Joaquim Gandara.

ASCII Cows
The canonical list of Ascii Cows.

ascii-art.com
ASCII art gallery by Joan Stark.

Popular Mechanics 1948
An article about “Keyboard Art” done with a typewriter in an October 1948 edition of Popular Mechanics.

While purely entertaining, doodling with a typewriter gives vent to the imagination and originality of both the experienced and the hunt-and-peck typist. Fill-in pictures are the easiest to “draw” with a typewriter. An example is shown in the flower which is made with the letter X alone. Such pictures, whether a flower or a portrait, are made by using an outline of the subject as a typing guide. This is done by tracing the outline lightly on paper and backing it with carbon paper to type the picture. Caricature or cartoon “drawing” combines letters with symbols as shown in the examples below. Here, half-spacing of the typewriter is required, as in the case of the owl’s beak and feet. The log cabin shows what can be done in drawing a picture in perspective.

Popular Science 1939
Typewriter Artist Produces Pictures Like Tapestry

Pictures that resemble tapestry are produced with a typewriter by Rosaire J. Belanger, a mill worker in Saco, Me. Belanger first draws a pencil sketch on a sheet of paper, then inserts it in his typewriter and fills in the sketch with various characters to produce shading and outlines. With carbon paper, he transfers the picture onto graph paper, and copies it on blank paper.

ASCII Babes
The worlds most beautiful celebrities like you’ve never seen them before.

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