Choose a subject for your typing design. If you have limited experience with ASCII art, you might want to depict something simple for your first few designs.
Consider the rendering style you want to emulate. Line art consists of dashes, underscores and hyphens that create the outline of your design. Practiced ASCII artists might create “solid art” which uses many more characters to create the illusion of depth, light and dark.
Draw your image on a sheet of plastic and tape over your computer monitor.
Open your text editor and type a row of spaces as long as your image. Copy and paste that row as many times as it takes to reach the height of your picture.
Turn on the overstrike by pressing the OVR button on your keyboard. You won’t need to use the space bar, Backspace, Delete or Enter keys; if you need to correct a character, simply position your cursor in front of it and type over it.
Use the image on the plastic sheet as a guide to draw the image in the text editor. Play with different symbols and characters to achieve different line weights or areas of shading. Take frequent breaks and look at the screen from across the room to check your progress.