Low Poly Art

Another great art style for beginners is low polygon (poly) art. It's uncomplicated and gorgeous. It's geometry with light reflection. The uniform color on each face synergizes across all faces to reinvent ideas. A majestic plain can be captured with just a few polygons. Low poly art is fun to look at, and I'm willing to bet it's fun to make.

The image above is the product of my efforts to learn low poly art after one tutorial. You can make a similar image by following the tutorials straight from the blender website. What's impressive is the magnitude of what it takes to make one of these. See, that's the joke. It doesn't take much, but the objects in the scene are to scale. The mountain is that much bigger than the trees, and the trees are that much smaller than the clouds.

You are the producer of your own scene. You have shapes and you thrust shapes into a world of your own design. You control the lights, the cameras, and the post processing. Imagine taking a photo of an arrangement. Each piece in the arrangement is there on purpose, it's deliberately designed and carefully crafted. With low poly art, you exact the same control over a virtual environment.

After you place your items into the scene, you get to mess around with lights and lighting effects. Without proper lighting, the colors are dull and boring. If you position your light source properly and change the light settings to achieve a flat shaded look, the scene will pop. That's what you want. The way the surfaces catch ambient and directional light, the surface color across all of the normal, that's what makes a simple image stand out.

I will be pursuing this further for sure. First, I want to look at works done by professionals, maybe that will give me some cool ideas.