Here is a pic of one of my low-tech tanks.
It has a fair bit of green thread algae now, partly because I'm tending to overfeed the fish due to there being lots of babies in the tank (visible in the picture) and partly because there isn't anything in the tank that eats that algae! When I take the minnows (white cloud mountain) and babies out and replace them with male guppies, it will look alot better!
You can see from this that I have no artistic talent. It isn't aquascaped at all, other than having taller plants towards the back and smaller ones towards the front. But (other than the algae) it looks good to me, at least better than a tank without plants would!