Outlines                                                     Final                                                      Gradients

Hey Y'all! I've got another project for ya. This one was incredibly tedious and made me loose my mind slightly at times. I created a photorealistic vector graphic of a watch. I created a watch based on a photo of a watch so I could learn how to capture small detail, highlights, and shadows. The hope was to create something with vectors that looks so realistic everyone would look at it and think it was simply just a photograph.

I started with some sketches creating outlines and shapes to give me some basic ideas of what to start with and how to get going. 

Then I jumped right into illustrator and created a basic outline of the watch I was recreating. I quickly ran into my first problem. I got excited and jumped right into it without the precise measurements I needed. After I realized this I laid out some guides and readjusted all of my shapes to be the precise measurements that I needed. 

After I had created the basic outlines and shape it was time to jump in and start on shadows and highlights. At this point as I tried to a Gaussian blur I realized my artboard was too small and I had to expand everything. Then as I slowly went piece by piece it started to come together and start to look like the photo. My coloring was still off though and I had to go back through and fix it. I created gradients and used a LOT of gaussian blur. 

After about 7 hours all I could think about was shapes, highlights, shadows, and why we perceive things to be certain ways. I could not get my brain to stop thinking about these shapes and I honestly felt like I was going a bit insane. I was also putting off the stitching a textures because the thought of it stressed me out a lot.

Eventually it came to the point that I needed to start on the wristband. I created a leather texture and very quickly became frustrated because illustrator started to constantly be crashing and it became a huge nuisance. I kept pushing through though and I learned a lot about layering and how layering with textures is super important to understand and know how to manipulate the right way.

More problems

I finally got to the stitching, I could not figure this out and I really struggled. I had a really hard time making it seem realistic and I felt like I was starting to loose my mind. On top of that my computer was struggling and was crashing more and more often. I lost my work on the stitching several times causing me to need to restart. I finally was able to create stitching that actually looked like something other then blobs however I realized I hated it and I deleted all three hours of work I had spent on it to start over from scratch. 

Finally...

This whole process was very long and tedious. It was very frustrating as times as well. But I learned so much about highlights, shadows, shapes, blur, and everything that can create the perception of the 3D things that we view and see. I was able to create a Vector that looked very close to the real photo. And the 30 hours it took to get there was so worth it!