Which are the recommended scripting languages for making graphics / pretty pictures in a Gnu/Unix
OS?
I would like to create 2-d and 3-d objects fast along with different things like shading them..
Does Python offer any support for doing such things?
There are OpenGL bindings for python, lua and ruby (and for nearly every other language). If you want to go with python, there are libraries like Panda3D, Soya3D
and OGRE (which by the way has also bindings for e.g. Perl, Ruby and others).