Eryk Salvaggio's ASCII Hearts

Eryk Salvaggio's ASCII Hearts
http://ascii-hearts.diaryland.com/

I'll be drawing one ascii heart for everyday that I am in love or until
I make 4000 hearts. If I fall out of love, or at some appropriate moment
after reaching 4000 hearts, the entire series will be printed and bound
into books with a rubber band, which will be sold to the highest bidders.

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When I used to be a graffiti artist we had graffiti books where we would
practice our words and toss ups. We'd get them them done as fast as we
could, experiment with new styles, and what we called "hype," ways of
decorating the space around a word. Besides our words we also had "toss
ups" which were symbols we would paint on the back of buildings,
something like "pieces" but usually smaller and easier to do, and they
had two letters from your main word involved. My main word was "fluxis"
and later on "matrix" but that changed when Keanu Reeves beat it to
death. So then I just started drawing hearts.

By drawing them over and over again you got quicker, but it also gave
you ideas based on mistakes you'd make, or from the boredom of doing it
so much, you'd start adding details to keep it interesting. Most of
these notebooks got tossed away when I was done but I have some that
marked major transitions from one word to the other.

For some reason or another I stopped doing graffiti right after my
freshman year of college, probably because I started really getting into
internet art. But also I think I just got too scared after some of my
friends were wanted by the police and all that, but now I have a chance
to go back to the ideas of the toss ups and sketch books and do them in
ascii. I think I always liked ascii because I liked words, and what you
could do with letters, that's what graffiti was all about for me. Now I
can make hearts as sketches as letters as hearts.


-eryk
age 9