"Watch'a doing?" A project that was difficult and really stretched my knowledge of illustrator but provided a lot of growth. The point was to take a watch or a few of them and create a vector graphic that was made to look like a real watch. My watch is not perfect, but I am very proud of the way it looks and how it turned out. 

I decided to take bits and pieces of two different watches to create my vector of a watch. I took mostly everything from the first watch, except, I replaced the outside of the watch face and the knob on the side, with those of the second watch. My first draft was very rough, but it was a great start for what I was going for with this project. 

The second draft I decided to experiment a little bit with shadows and highlights along the watch face. They were not perfect, but they gave me a nice idea of what I wanted to work towards. I started adding in some very rough shadows on the band, they were mainly just used as placeholders for where shadows would need to be included. 

With this draft I started to get the shapes more perfected for the band, since they have just been rectangles up until this point when in reality they did not have hard edges but more circular ones. I also started adding in more details to the watch face itself, with the minute and hour hashes. The colors were also worked on a little bit so that they felt more natural and closer to the picture. 

I really like the way the final turned out. I added gradients to nearly every piece of the band and then overlayed shadows and highlights on top of each piece. I think placed a main shadow behind so you could not see any white behind. Shadows and highlights were added to the watch face, both the outer and inner part as well. I layered them and placed gradients on different layers to create a more realistic feel. I added shadows and highlights to the numbers, letters, minute marks and hour marks as well, which created a more dynamic look. Then I worked on the shadows and highlights that I had originally to make them blend in better and fit more with the watch. 

As you can see there are a lot of different layers and pieces used in this composition, but they added up to a very good final product. I think when looked at from far away it would look real to most anyone. As you get more up close you can tell its not, but it is a great start and there are aspects that really do look real to a viewer. This was a fun project and I intend to do more of these sort of things in the future to test and try my skills further.