Hello everyone! Today I will be detailing one of my favorite art styles: low poly!

What is Low Poly?

Being fond of math, I have been a fan of neatness and simplicity in art, so low poly satisfies plenty of that! Low poly breaks down an image into triangles that try and recreate the same image with a geometric twist. Take, for example, the gradient below:

Although originally composed of smooth color transitions, it is now separated into discrete (distinct) measures.

Now, why use triangles? Let’s say that we have four points in a plane. Can you make a rectangle? Maybe, but that’s a strong maybe. Now, with triangles, you can definitely make two triangles out of those four points. And don’t talk to me about going down to the pixel level, because that’s just plain cheating ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Similarly, pentagons and hexagons and all that are just too much, but triangles are nice and simple!

Using it!

Now, in my opinion, low poly works best for anything with a lot of smooth colors, like the gradient above. That’s why I’m considering it for another NFT series, hopefully!

Also, the picture above has only 50 triangles. If it had several hundred, the effect might be kind of lost!

So here are my conditions for using low poly to make something look sleeker:

• It’s colorful. Any black and white images are going to give us grays, which are less impressive.
• It’s gradual or a photo. If you use a piece of art that is too discrete, it will be very easy to turn it into triangles. A rectangle is just two triangles. So throw in some gradients (like the Engradiente collection) or use a real photo!
• You’re shooting for a simplified look. If you’re centered around the types of art that this website is (abstract, geometric, simple!) then it’s golden. But there are different things you can do if you still want the photo to look real that aren’t low poly.

Anyway, that’s it for now! (Not that bad, eh?) Wait around for the next style that I’ll look at, which is using gradients like this ->( background )<- one that’s right here!

Also, as always, I hope you learned something! And if you didn’t, here’s something that you did: cows have 32 teeth!

Goodbye!