Classic Cartoon Character TwitterArt

I’m getting a kick out of this TwitterArt by Gregory Wadsworth, a freelance 3D illustrator in Manhattan. He’s creating a chronological series of tweets commemorating Hollywood cartoon stars – in tweets composed of the maximum of 140 characters.

I’m not sure I understand how he does it, but Greg explains:

“The tweets are composed of a maximum of 140 Unicode box-drawing characters. Box-drawing characters were developed to create tables (frames, or row and column separations) for early text-based computer interfaces, like DOS. To create the imagery, each box-drawing “word” – separated with a space or line-break character – has to be long enough so that it wraps under the previous “word.” Here is a list of articles about “twitter art”.

I’m only representing characters that were created for animation. Adapted characters like Popeye and Bonzo aren’t included. It’s limited to headliners who appeared in four or more cartoons, which excludes characters like Gertie and Goopy Geer. For teams like Tom and Jerry, only one character will be represented. Many early characters, whose images were difficult to obtain, were also left out. Some browsers will display the designs better than others. The series will likely end with 1949.”

Beautiful work! Follow Greg and his tweets, here.