This project was very intense but I honestly had a blast doing it! There's something about making something photorealistic from just paths and anchor points that is really appealing to me. It helped me see reflections differently, and now I can't read the time on my own watch without analyzing the reflections coming off of it!

The main objective of this was to create a watch on Adobe Illustrator that is extremely close to the real world counterpart. This is much more complex than it initially seems though - every small detail needs to be mimicked, even down to the second hand!  I have never mimicked something in a completely different art medium before and turning a real photograph into a vector image was very challenging but very satisfactory.

I started out with a lot of ideas for watches that I wanted to do. I had some unique ideas that I would use to search for watches but ultimately ended up with a more refined idea with a black and gold look. I searched for what seemed like hours for a watch that I would really enjoy making. I wanted it to be mostly black with bright accents, but not too bright. I wanted something a gentleman would wear but also have a rugged look to it. I didn't nail the rugged look but I got a design I really enjoy.

I decided on a watch with these characteristics before I found the Nixon watch. I wanted a metal band with three sections to it, a crown that wasn't round but more of a piece with ridges, an elegant watch face, and rough and tough looking hands. It's quite the unique challenge finding a watch with the elements that I want, but when I found it I sketched some other parts of it to really get the design of it in my head. When I was working on the sketches I realized that the shading on the watch was going to be my biggest challenge, and working on the watch that definitely was true! I also realized that the dial would be incredibly hard to pull off on a watch like this - There are so many tiny edges and the shading is incredibly intricate!

Something interesting happened while working on this watch which was completely unintentional. I started applying finishing touches on Friday the 13th, which coincidentally is the exact date on the watch! Working on this watch was a blast and naturally I wanted to do the fun stuff first - the technical little shadows around the bezel of the face. I stayed up the night that I started working on this until 3AM because I was so entranced in the minute details of it. Pun intended. One of the most challenging parts of this was using the rotation tool while duplicating the parts, they just didn't want to be a perfect circle. I ended up just manually doing some of the work instead.

Above is the draft that got critiqued by my peers. They had some great tips and tricks for me to get my design to the next level! Here are a few of the critiques I got and how I incorporated them into my design.

Critique: The seconds hand looks like it's the wrong shape and the texture isn't parallel.

Response: I adjusted the seconds hand by creating a new one from scratch. I followed the dimensions of it put a new texture on it which works better.

Critique: The minute and hour hands are too large.

Response: I molded them to fit into the original shape better as well as give them a little more texturing.

Critique: The date isn't shaded.

Response: This was actually one of the more challenging part of the project - text acts really odd with gradients in illustrator so I had to get outside help just to give the text shading so it actually looks curved.

Critique: The reflections of the white dots isn't a shape, it's more round.

Response: I adjusted the shape and made them fade into the back more.

Critique: The color on the hands isn't as vibrant as on the photo example.

Response: I adjusted the coloring on the hands to make them more vibrant as well as add texture to them.

My design reaches all the requirements expected of me. The requirements were to create a photorealistic watch with moving mechanical parts and/or a quartz display. It said to use transparencies and gradients to make the lighting come to life which I did. My watch did not have many reflections on the face of it but there were incredibly small details in the shading of the case. My objective was met as well because my objective was to create a watch from scratch to mimic almost perfectly the look of it's real life counterpart. I even tested this on 6 of my friends, who viewed the real one and the fake one next to each other and guessed which one was fake. 2 out of 6 guessed wrong which means that my design holds up to the objective!