Ascii art dates back to the typewriter days of the 1800s. Its not the most elegant medium to work with - but sometimes it is effective (and fun). There are some extremely talented artists in this area - I recommend a google search one day when you are bored.
I made the above using steemit tags and zeros and ones. I couldn't paste the actually ascii in here because of formatting issues.. This is a snapshot of it in "notepad".
*Posted by ladder.net