Low Poly Illustration

• Rebuild every subject (animal, face, vehicle, mountain, island) from a mesh of relatively few connected points, and replace every curve with a run of straight edges, so that form reads as a set of hard, angular facets.
• Fill each facet with a single flat tone and let the step from one facet to the next do all the modelling: a key light in 3D, or neighbouring colours sampled from a photograph or a colour ramp in 2D. Use no outlines, texture maps or brushwork.
• Spend polygons where the form needs them (eyes, joints, silhouettes, the ridge of a mountain) and keep the rest coarse, so the reduction looks designed and lit rather than produced by decimating a detailed mesh.
• Isolate one subject, island or small diorama, often in an isometric or axonometric view, on a plain or softly graded ground, or fill a whole background evenly with a triangle mesh in one colour ramp.
• The style has no typographic canon of its own: set titles in a clean geometric sans beside the faceted picture, or choose a display face whose straight segments echo the polygons.

Networked digital illustration and independent game culture (Dribbble, Behance, Steam). Real-time 3D was mostly built from polygon meshes, from early polygonal console games such as Star Fox (Nintendo EAD and Argonaut Software, 1993) to the fifth- and sixth-generation consoles; that 1990s polygonal 3D has no entry of its own in the atlas, so the parent here is bitmap-pixel, the nearest game-graphics ancestor. By 2012 creators were treating a low polygon count as a choice rather than a limit: Eran Hilleli's graduation film Between Bears (Bezalel, 2010), praised at the time for its 'low-poly models', was an early example, and the Milwaukee 3D illustrator Timothy J. Reynolds was building a low poly series in Cinema 4D, including his 'Low-Poly, Isometric Worlds' (Dribbble interview, October 2012; GIGAZINE, December 2012), while bloggers noted low-polygon art 'making the rounds' (November 2012). Indie games followed, among them Santa Ragione's MirrorMoon EP (4 September 2013), whose Steam page promises 'astonishing low-poly sceneries' and which Wikipedia (uncited) calls the oldest Steam game tagged 'low poly'. Triangle-mesh generators such as Quinn Rohlf's Trianglify (April 2014) and image-stylisation algorithms carried the look into 2D vector illustration, posters and web backgrounds

1. Wikipedia, 'Low poly' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_poly), an article flagged 'More citations needed': low poly as a deliberate aesthetic rather than an optimisation (cited to Sessions College); a specific style from late 2013, crediting Timothy J. Reynolds; MirrorMoon EP (September 2013) as the oldest Steam title tagged 'low poly'; Into this Wylde Abyss (2014); 244 tagged Steam titles 2014–2018; Superhot, Necropolis, Grow Up, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator and Ravenfield listed as notable games 'since the late-2010s'. Much of it is unsourced: the pixel-art analogy and the Cézanne comparison are tagged citation needed; the console nostalgia, the MirrorMoon, Steam-tag and games-list claims carry no reference; and the late-2013 date and the credit to Reynolds rest only on the Lesterbanks article of March 2014, which gives September 2013 as the start of his freelance career, not of the style, and says he had been making low poly art 'for the last few years'
2. Lesterbanks, 'It's the Polygons You Don't See, The Low Poly Art of Timothy J. Reynolds' (5 March 2014), https://lesterbanks.com/2014/03/polygons-dont-see-low-poly-art-timothy-j-reynolds/ (Milwaukee freelance 3D illustrator since September 2013; Cinema 4D and Photoshop process; clients MakerBot, Facebook, Greenpeace, Fast Company, Wired; 'I just like hard edges'; low poly is hard to do well beyond decimating a mesh; 'creating and refining his low poly art for the last few years')
3. Timothy J. Reynolds, portfolio, https://www.turnislefthome.com/ (The North Face 'Homestead' collection, Spring 2016: low-poly pattern design; Twitch, Red Robin and other clients)
4. Sessions College, 'What's the Deal with Low Poly Art?', https://www.sessions.edu/notes-on-design/whats-the-deal-with-low-poly-art/ (dated 15 January 2016 on the page; Wikipedia cites it as 15 January 2015): simple geometric shapes placed side by side in angular, often minimalist compositions; low polygon counts first used to cut render times; Paul Douard, Hesham Adel, Calder Moore, Amjad Ahdab, Jona Dinges, CAZAPAPELES; Photoshop, Illustrator and Cinema 4D
5. Steam store, MirrorMoon EP (app 231310), https://store.steampowered.com/app/231310/ (developer and publisher Santa Ragione; released 4 September 2013)
6. Wikipedia, 'Superhot' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superhot): 7 Day FPS Challenge, August 2013; release 25 February 2016; art director Marcin Surma, 'minimalistic by design'; white environment, black interactive objects, red enemies; the article never calls the game low poly
7. Quinn Rohlf, Trianglify, https://github.com/qrohlf/trianglify ('Algorithmically generated triangle art'; ColorBrewer palettes; GPL-3.0; repository created 12 April 2014) and the npm package https://www.npmjs.com/package/trianglify (first published 15 April 2014)
8. Thitiwudh Uasmith, Tantikorn Pukkaman and Peeraya Sripian, 'Low-Poly Image Stylization', Journal for Geometry and Graphics 21(1), 2017, 131–139, https://www.heldermann.de/JGG/JGG21/JGG211/jgg21012.htm ('A low-poly image is a minimalist style of art that is currently widely used'; raster to low-poly vector conversion with K-means segmentation and Delaunay triangulation)
9. Meng Gai and Guoping Wang, 'Artistic Low Poly rendering for images', The Visual Computer 32(4), 2016, 491–500 (published online 9 April 2015), doi:10.1007/s00371-015-1082-2
10. Wikipedia, 'Star Fox (1993 video game)' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Fox_(1993_video_game)): Nintendo EAD and Argonaut Software; released in Japan on 21 February 1993 and North America on 23 March 1993; the first Nintendo game to use polygonal graphics, through the Super FX chip
11. MyFonts, Alphii by Ray Larabie (Typodermic), https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/typodermic/alphii (MyFonts debut 22 June 2006; curves replaced by straight segments)
12. Dribbble, 'Timeout: Timothy J. Reynolds', 24 October 2012, https://dribbble.com/stories/2012/10/24/timeout-with-timothy-j-reynolds (he continues 'to build on my low poly series', linked to his isometric work; 'for the last year or so' focused on personal work)
13. GIGAZINE, 'A small world with a fantastic atmosphere drawn with 3DCG polygon "Low-Poly, Isometric Worlds"', 30 December 2012, https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20121230-low-poly-world (Reynolds's series: rocky mountain, inside the factory, racing car, aerial road and other scenes)
14. yewknee.com, 'The Rise of Low-Polygon Art', 2 November 2012, https://yewknee.com/blog/the-rise-of-low-polygon-art ('Lately I've been seeing more and more "low-polygon" art making the rounds'; Geo A Day and works by Tim Reynolds)
15. Art-Spire, 'Short Animation Film #29: Between Bears', 14 August 2010, https://www.art-spire.com/en/3d/short-animation-film-29-between-bears/ (graduation project at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem; 'The low-poly models, the fantastic framing and the astonishing soundtrack totally immerse us')
16. Amid Amidi, 'Between Bears by Eran Hilleli', Cartoon Brew, 3 August 2010, https://cartoonbrew.com/cgi/between-bears-by-eran-hilleli-26237.html (style crafted in Maya and After Effects; graduation short made at Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem)

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