The Timepiece Project
By Westley Mata
February 4, 2019 at 8:00am marked the start of the Watch Project. For my Vector Graphics class at Brigham Young University - Idaho, I was assigned to build a photo-realistic watch in Adobe Illustrator. I had the choice of what watch I got to replicate and/or use as reference as long as it was analog. I chose to use a gold Hamilton Automatic watch with brown leather straps because it looked like it would stretch me in multiple ways, and I was up for that challenge. A large objective for me was to better learn the Illustrator program, but I was also desperate for a beautiful realistic piece for my designer portfolio. This is the progress that I took to complete this photo-realistic Watch Project.
As mentioned before, my goal in this project was to create a photo-realistic watch using Illustrator, not to necessarily copy the reference image detail for detail. That being said, it can still be easy to overlook the detail put into a vector graphic piece.
I picked this Hamilton watch because of the subtle details in the metal pieces as well as the subtle shading in the center. In order to understand the shapes better, I drew a series of sketches. After drawing the shapes a few times I felt like I had a hold of the general frame of the watch and details.
An example of how I was able to grasp the shapes better shows in my crown thumbnail sketches 4, 5, 11, 15, and 22. 4 and 5 are outline sketches and don't show much understanding of the shape. I drew 11 out of basic shapes, and 15 really shows that strongly. 22 was a final combination of the understanding I achieved from drawing up the other four of the same subject.
Now that you understand a little better what it took to understand the shapes, here's a series of drafts from throughout the process. The left watch-face draft was actually the very first time I saved the project, and the one on the far right is the last time I saved it. The images between the ends are just a few of the steps I went through to get it to look like the final result. Throughout the project, I was posting to a group chat with many other students also taking on the same assignment to get critiques and tips for making my watch look more polished. In a blog post it might appear as a quick process, but in total it took about 18 hours of meticulous work to complete.
I am grateful for the peer review critiques I received through this project. There were many instances I was able to improve details by using their comments, one of which had to do with the wording in the center. A fellow student pointed out that my Hamilton was not quite centered in a draft that was in between draft one and two (shown above), and the rest of my design would look slightly off center if I had not aligned the wording like she suggested.
Here's my final draft blown up at a better size:
Conclusion
After completing the project, I feel my objectives have been met. I have grown significantly in my speed and competence when using vector graphics, and have found clipping masks to be Illustrator's version of a man's best friend. My understand of masks (clipping and gradient), texture implementation, and general shape building skills have been stretched these last two weeks. I believe my second objective has been met as well. I have this beautifully realistic image that has tricked several friends into thinking it's a photograph. I plan to create a few more watches in the future to get better and even faster at the process. As the creator the piece, and a designer, I am able to still see many small flaws that need fixing, and I plan to continue refining it to also gain more practice and to make it completely unrecognizable as a vector image.
I'll talk to you later in my next designer update.
-West
