6 months later, I’ve finally finished my first poly illustration. What started out as a low-poly illustration design exercise, started with the help of a Skillshare class, turned into a long-winded high-poly (but still not perfect) personal design challenge.
Steps:
- Choose a photograph.
- Draw triangles all over it in Photoshop. Larger triangles for low-poly and small triangles for more detail and high-poly.
- Pull it in to illustrator and vectorize all of the triangles.
- Make sure all the points align and there are no white spaces in between.
- Use “average” of the color for each “triangle real-estate” to color each final triangle.
Process Photos
Lessons learned:
- Patience. Aligning the triangles in illustrator was the biggest headache. I broke it up into several sessions (thus the reason it took several months to complete).
- Content creation. While I initially chose my face (I thought I’d be replacing / using it for branding), I regret not choosing a simpler object. With a face, it’s almost necessary to go into detail or it looks too abstract. If I had just chosen a vase with flowers, I think it would have been a more versatile exercise.
- Triangles are pretty darn cool. Being forced to use only triangles for the illustration really brings you back to the basics.