Copy-pasting is a clever way to do it!
I used to use TheDraw for doing ANSI art, but I also ended up making my own ANSI drawing tool back then. It's stupid to think of now, but one reason I made it was because I had a monochrome monitor, so I couldn't "see" color. I wanted a feature where I could put the cursor over a character and it would tell me the color there when I was drawing so I could still use color in the work.
I wasn't prolific, but did do a handful of ANSI art pieces for local BBS SysOps who liked them well enough. Only later on I realized when I got an actual color monitor that I had a few color mistakes in them and they never told me. lol
Damn, more OG than me. I must have looked up to you and your peers back then! It’s crazy how it was so common to just go in a hex editor and mess with files to see what would happen. Would love to see a submission of what you / group / other notables did.