This is the normal photo of the watch. I thought the patterns made for a unique design that stood out from other watches that I normally see, but wouldn't make for a super difficult time replicating the design.

I'll be honest... I didn't spend a lot of time sketching. Since it was mainly concentric circles and lines, the design like I said is pretty simple. Mainly I used this as an opportunity to note details like brushed metal and pose the question of how I would accomplish that. Mainly my thoughts boiled down to how I was going to accomplish different textures.

This was kind of my first reality check point for this project. I was creating lots of different lines and guides to try and get proportions and everything right. This is when I really started taking note of just how many teeny tiny little details there were in this watch. I noticed just how the lines on the minute and hour hands were laid out. I noticed how the bevels of the chassis of the watch were bending and catching light. It really made for an overwhelming experience at first. However, I pushed forward and slowly but surely the watch started coming to life.

At this point, I decided that I needed to just get the shapes down and then I could start working from there. Getting the basic shapes down and then spending time refining each shape really helped to make this process a lot more digestible. This is when I really started feeling like this project was going to be easier than I anticipated.

Not surprising, the longer I stared at this watch, the more details came out. And those details mostly started taking the form of these different textures that I found on the watch. From the grain of the leather band, the to brushed metal of the chassis, to the smooth reflections of the glass. All of these different surfaces needed to be represented, but also I didn't want to be painting bumps on a leather band and brushing steel for the rest of my life. So, some tricks were used to maintain the vector nature of the image while also expediting the process of making these different textures.

One trick that was used was taking an actual leather texture, and tracing the image in Illustrator to get the designs. Basically taking a leather texture, putting it into photoshop, applying a threshold mask to it, and then once I brough that into Illustrator and I traced the image. The result gave a pretty convincing leather texture. But as you'll see, it's just a bunch of small vector shapes.

The next texture that I needed to work on was the brushed steel. I didn't think I would be able to effectively trace the texture like I did for the leather texture on the watch bands. So I had to think of something else. So I started dissecting what brushed metal was.

I determined that brushed metal was exactly that, metal that was brushed with a mild abrasive to give it a streaked texture. So I thought about different abrasives that and thought about sand paper. I thought about what made sand paper abrasive and obviously it's sand. Sand is just a singular speck. But when drug across a surface, it makes scratches like you might see on brushed metal. So with that, I had an idea. 

In Illustrator, you can generate a limited selection of textures. But one of them is a grain textures (like a grain of sand). So I decided to generate this static grain and from there, I could do a radial blur to basically "brush" those dots out and make the texture. This was effective.

After that was glass. Now, we don't often think of the texture of glass other than smooth. But how do you demonstrate a smooth, clear material? By all accounts it's invisible, right? Well, as we know, vision is just our eyes reception of light being translated by our brains. So, if it has a glare, we can know it's there.

And so once I found the subtle glare of the glass on the image, I added it in. It's one of those small details, but it's one that I felt was crucial to express the fact that there is glass on this watch.

So after going through and applying textures, adding highlights, shadows, tonal contrast, lining things up, pulling my hair out, and then finally getting to the end of it all, We have what I would consider a pretty detailed watch. 

Here you can see just how many different shapes went into creating all of the different shapes and details of this watch. All in all, it was a SUPER fun project, and it's something that I would like to try with other items that I have around my house. As I'm writing this, I'm looking at the stream decks on my desk and am thinking of doing those. But we'll see. Stay tuned!