I'm actively working on a VisiData-based drawing tool that a) uses unicode (including full-width chars), b) supports 256-colors, c) supports animations, and d) works in the terminal. It's called DarkDraw and is already making it easier to create modern terminal art.
These days it looks like PabloDraw might be the way to go.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIGlet [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PabloDraw