Ways to learn to draw using ASCII?

[Master Razor]

I'm interested in drawing in ASCII characters but do not know where to start. I'm thinking those ware groups that have their nfo files do not draw using one character at a time.
Does anyone know how these things are made?

[Lucius]

There is some sites and programs that convert your pics to ascii.

[anon]

My guess is that they have their own programs to convert images to ASCII (or draw it directly following instructions from a file), and only make the finishing touches manually.

[takomania]

ascii artists up until the mid 80's created everything manually, one character at a time, starting at the top left of an image, working consecutively across each pixel and line until they hit the bottom right of the image. you could not insert/overwrite on many systems, so if you made a mistake, you had to delete the whole line and start again.

the mid 80's saw tools such as Drew Olbrich's AnsiPaint appear, which greatly sped up the process and modern day equivilents are very similar in functionality (of course, memoryspace has been greatly increased).

as the other guys have said, there are programs out there to convert modern image formats to ascii/ansi and also a number of freeware tools to create art from scratch - just google around. none of the ansi paint tools are exactly feature packed though, as it's down to how the artist uses the basic tools they have been given.