Shading with block characters: notes on 90s ANSI art
ANSI artists in the mid-90s worked with a tiny toolkit: a handful of block characters from the IBM PC's extended character set and a 16-color palette. That was enough for most BBS login screens. Setting a dark foreground over a lighter background with the right shade block gives you in-between tones the palette doesn't have. That's how groups like ACiD and iCE got smooth gradients out of hardware that could only show sixteen colors. In this post I take apart a few screens from the HackerZ Hideout archive, block by block, to show how the shading was built.
The rest of this post is still being written.