ascii-pixel-art

ascii-pixel-art is a skill for Claude Code from ckorhonen/claude-skills. It costs 58 tokens per session (1,493 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A tool that turns images into animated ASCII art: pictures made from text characters. It detects the main subject, adds a blurred pixel-style background, and creates visual effects in HTML.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create animated image displays, interactive web art, social-media visuals, retro or cyberpunk designs, and creative-coding demonstrations.
Why use it?
It provides a way to make photos or portraits into interactive retro-style visuals without drawing the result by hand.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the claude-skills plugin — 62 skills, 4 commands, 7 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to create animated image displays, interactive web art, social-media visuals, retro or cyberpunk designs, and creative-coding demonstrations.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ckorhonen/claude-skills/ascii-pixel-art
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add ckorhonen/claude-skills --skill ascii-pixel-art
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ckorhonen/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install claude-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 62 skills, 4 commands, 7 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for ascii-pixel-art

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ckorhonen/claude-skills/ascii-pixel-art/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ckorhonen/claude-skills/ascii-pixel-art)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ckorhonen/claude-skills/ascii-pixel-art"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ckorhonen/claude-skills/ascii-pixel-art/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for ascii-pixel-art

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ckorhonen/claude-skills/ascii-pixel-art"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ckorhonen/claude-skills/ascii-pixel-art.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 58 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,493 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00058 $0.01493
Opus 5 $0.00029 $0.00746
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00299
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00149

Measured 12d ago against content hash 46b894b35ec5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ascii-pixel-art scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/ascii_pixel_effect.py, scripts/test_logic.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/ascii-pixel-art/SKILL.md · 195 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 195 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ASCII Pixel Art Generator

Generate animated ASCII art from images with subject detection, blurred pixelated backgrounds, and dynamic visual effects.

Description

Transform images into interactive ASCII art with sophisticated visual effects. Uses computer vision to detect subjects, creates atmospheric backgrounds, and adds cinematic animations including pulse effects, diagonal sweeps, random flickers, and interactive hover responses.

When to Use

Use when:

  • Creating artistic visualizations of photos or portraits
  • Generating retro/cyberpunk aesthetic content
  • Building interactive web art pieces
  • Converting images to animated HTML displays
  • Creating unique social media content
  • Demonstrating creative coding techniques

Do NOT use when:

  • Simple text-based ASCII art is sufficient
  • Performance is critical (heavy processing required)
  • Accessibility is paramount (relies on visual effects)
  • Source image has no clear subject (works best with portraits/objects)
  • Output needs to be static (this generates animated HTML)

Prerequisites

Required packages:

pip install pillow rembg numpy

System requirements:

  • Python 3.7+
  • ~500MB RAM for image processing
  • rembg model downloads automatically (~180MB)

Usage

Basic Command

python3 scripts/ascii_pixel_effect.py <input_image> [output.html]

Examples

# Generate with default output name
python3 scripts/ascii_pixel_effect.py portrait.jpg

# Specify output file
python3 scripts/ascii_pixel_effect.py photo.png artwork.html

# Process multiple images
for img in *.jpg; do
  python3 scripts/ascii_pixel_effect.py "$img" "${img%.jpg}.html"
done

How It Works

7-Step Pipeline

1. Load and Resize

  • Opens image, converts to RGB
  • Resizes to 900px width (maintains aspect ratio)
  • Uses LANCZOS filter for high-quality downscaling

2. Build Blurred Background

  • Applies Gaussian blur (radius=14)
  • Darkens by 35% (multiply by 0.65)
  • Desaturates 50% (blend with luminance grayscale)
  • Pixelates using BOX filter downscale + NEAREST upscale
  • Creates atmospheric base layer

Read the full file on GitHub · 195 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 195 lines · 58 tokens per session scan A 46b894b35ec5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ascii-pixel-art is a skill published in the GitHub repository ckorhonen/claude-skills (14 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 58 tokens to every session and 1,493 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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