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I draw all of my pictures in vim.
Before starting the drawing I make a canvas of whitespace characters. For this I do the vim shortcut "ESC 70 i SPACE ESC" and mark the end of my canvas with a # symbol. Then I yank the line and paste it a bunch until I have a nice canvas size.
Why 70? I would normally not make them larger than that because it makes them more usable. For example, I wrap my plain text email as recommended at 72 chars. With a 70 char wide image, I can easily add it and even indent it or put a nice frame around it:
<----72-chars---> <---70-chars--> +---------------+ | | | | | Image | | | | goes | | | | here | | | | | +---------------+
Usually my images end up much smaller than this though because making them this large is usually not necessary and also makes it much easier to draw - which can kind of ruin the fun.
When I have my Canvas of whitespaces I go into REPLACE mode and just type over everything. This way, you can get into a nice drawing flow without having to deal with things moving around.
If I want to insert longer vertical and horizontal lines I use the visual block mode in vim and replace an entire selection with |, - or _.