ASCII art that looks drawn by hand.

Drop in a photo, a video or your webcam. Shape the tones like in a darkroom, choose how characters get picked, then export straight to GitHub, Discord, your terminal or a GIF.

Open the studio

Free and open source, no sign-up. Everything runs in your browser, and your images never leave your device.

Live demo

Press a key to change how characters are chosen, or drop any image onto this page.

More than a filter.

A proper instrument for character art, with the parts other converters skip.

Characters chosen by shape, not just darkness

Most converters only ask how dark a patch is. Shape mode compares every cell with the outline of each glyph, so a diagonal becomes a slash and a lower edge becomes an underscore. The result reads like something an artist typed.

Portraits written in your own words

Pick a name, a quote or a line you wrote, and the image gets drawn with it. Brightness sets how bold each letter looks. Made for gifts, posters and profile headers.

Live video, webcam and recorded clips

Point your camera at something and watch it turn into characters in real time. Record up to ten seconds, or loop any still image with effects like decode, rain, scan and wave. Export as a GIF, a video file or a tiny HTML player.

Touch it up by hand

Paint characters, erase the background or type a signature straight onto the canvas. Your edits stay in place while you keep adjusting tone and width.

Exports that land in the right shape.

Every destination has its own limits. Pick where it's going and Atelier sizes, wraps and encodes it for you.

  • ```textGitHub READMECode block that survives Markdown
  • 2,000DiscordChecked against the message limit
  • ```SlackSized so it doesn't wrap
  • \e[38;2Terminal24-bit ANSI color for banners and CLIs
  • style=""Email signatureInline-styled HTML that pastes cleanly
  • <pre>Web embedOne self-contained tag
  • .pngImageSharp, on any of the three backgrounds
  • .svgVectorCrisp at poster size
  • .gifGIFSeamless loops from any image or clip
  • .mp4VideoReady to post on social

Your images never leave your browser.

No uploads, no accounts, no waiting on a server. Conversion, recording and encoding all happen on your own device. The code is open source, so you can check that for yourself.