To create ASCII art or just some colorful things with lots of ANSI color codes, there’s the package aewan – Ascii-art Editor Without A Name.
aewan itself saves the files in an own format. But there’s the tool aecat which lets you cat those files – and thus you can also write the output into another file to get a normal file with ANSI codes which can be shown using the normal cat.
aecat colorful.aew > colorful.txt