Hey there!
I have been wanting to use Blender for art that has the same feel to it as if it came from Illustrator, ie 2d shapes with distinct colors.
As my first subject I made this squirrel with flat vertexpaint. I think it works pretty well. I will make som emore and see what kind of a scene I can put together.
I think both of them are super appealing. 
Im a little jealous in fact. It looks so “simple” as far a style goes. Just a few colors here and there, simple shapes. but I know there is nothing simple about it.
Are you planning to make them move? I’ve recently started with blender again but I’ve been a bit aimless. Would you think its fun if I tried to rig one of them as a personal project/some sort of informal collab?
Hey! Yeah, the point is to make shapes that look like vectors and primitives. The flat rendering helps to allso hide whetever flaws the models have.
I am pondering what it would take to make them move. These are pure sculpts that are not made with any thought to topology or anything else.
So I would remake them with a better polycount first, something I was allready going to do anyway.
Or I can do this. The next one I make I will do intentionally for animation. Maby a cat.
Yeah at the very least they’d have to be retopo’d. I guess that would be pretty quick with shapes as relatively simple as these.
Happy to hear you have plans to make them move. Either these one’s or future designs. Ill watch with interest.
Hey there.
After working on this for a while and trying to figure out what I want to do with it, I made this short animation as a test.
What do you think of it?
Hey arch. Fun to see you experimenting with animation!
It seems the video got removed recently (not quite sure why but I get the message now its unavailable).
From what I remember when I saw it initially I did feel it lost some of the charm of the original design. There were hard edges in the colors now which gave me the impression it may have been done with material assignments to polygon selections instead of uv unwrapping and texture painting.
Its a bit more work to set up but I think its definitely worth it to do so and try to get closer to your original design. I think a more flat shaded look, perhaps just by lowering or removing the specular opponent would look much better. You could fake the highlight on the eye by using a full white flat circle mesh that you rig to follow the eye surface. Its done often done that way for cartoony eyes.
As for the animation; its very fun to see it move. 
birdanimationsflat0001-0170.mkv (1.5 MB)
So I redid the render so I could use a flat style. This is how the same animation looks.
I gave it a shot. The texture is now more like watercolors and the shading is flat.
I think this looks more in line with your original designs and is also much more appealing! Great job
I think both of them look nice but the one on the right has my preference. I think if you lower the specular and perhaps have some color bleed into what specular is there the non flat shaded version could also look quite nice.
Thanks for your feedback. I am allways looking for my “style” and keeps drifting.
Maby once I have another character and place them into a proper scene, I can descide.
