My first attempt at low poly art

My first attempt at low poly art

So I have been thinking of what to post as my first real piece of content here. I finally decided on the process and lessons learned from making my first low polygon picture. This is the result of about 8 hours of work. I intend to build off the initial tutorial and provide some important lessons and details to keep in mind that will hopefully save you lots of hours. The original tutorial can be found right here.

  1. The first piece of advice that I can give is that it will turn out good but nothing like what you might think it will. I am very happy on how it turned out but it was nowhere near the level of a professional. So don’t give up, it will all work out in the end.
  2. Pay close detail to the geometry of different key figures and plan to make them work. Case in point, if you look at the thickness of the top of my right rims vs the thickness of my left then you will see what i’m talking about. I did not plan out the symmetry well enough and it came to bite me later on when I was filling in the colors.
  3. When choosing colors, try to add darker shades for contrast and for depth of field.
  4. Try overlaying a blurred photo when choosing colors so you can get a more accurate representation of what is the major color in that polygon.
  5. When making the polygons in illustrator, make sure you create full triangles and not just lines. I created mainly just single lines and connected them at the points. Im sure there was some kind of way to make them into one shape in order to fill them properly but it was just too many lines I messed up and had to redraw most of the polygons.

Those are my 5 tips to keep in mind when you do your first or next low polygon photo. I am very excited to do more on all sorts of different subjects. I think doing characters from video games will be fun, even some nature scenes would be a nice challenge. Though I think my low poly will be of a company logo, they are usually quite simple and already look great.

Hopefully this helps someone or inspires someone to make some low poly art. I think it is quite awesome and has a lot of room for a creator’s interpretations and creativity.