I'll add some info about my own ascii art workflow.

Like xero at first I had no clue about pablodraw so I did all my art in vim. First filling a full block with spaces, then entering replace mode and drawing. Then I would manually insert the ANSI color escape codes, which was extremely tedious, to say the least.

When I joined an ascii art group called impure they taught me about pablodraw but I just couldn't get used to the keybinds, as xero mentioned it's not well documented. So what I'm doing is that I draw the art in vim and I add the colors in pablodraw. However, lately I've gone full black and white, raw ascii art without color. I feel like it makes me focus more on forms, feelings, and meanings than with colors.

There's one thing to add and it's the discussion about displaying the ascii art outside from terminal emulators, in places that don't support ANSI sequences. This can be done by opening the art in pablodraw and saving it in an image format, this can be done by taking a screenshot of the terminal emulator, this can be done by using web interfaces such as 16colo.rs, or this can be done with a software like ascii.js or ascii2png.

Depending on what I want I usually take a screenshot from the terminal or using ascii2svg and then open the svg with inkscape and export it in the size I want. For example, that's what I use to generate the art on my redbubble account.