Vector Graphics in my mind have always been very simple cutesy bubble images that are used to make emojis. In order to break that misconception I was tasked with creating something believable in Adobe Illustrator, and I failed miserably. This is what happened, and the incredibly valuable things I learned from sinking hours into learning what needs to be done to create photo-realistic objects with no pre-made assets.

I really wanted to try and capture what light does when it bends around plastic and Metal, I Found myself focusing pretty hard on the shadows and how they were hard to recreate in smaller plastic areas. You can see a lot of my sketches covered grainy metallic surfaces which in the end I did not wind up using, but it was good practice in training my mind to look for smaller changes in color rather than seeing it all as dark blue. Most importantly I looked at how glass created solid non-gradient shapes with it's color and less smooth surfaces like plastic and rubber had a gradient spread.

I know it is stunning how close my draft is. The colors are almost the same! Sadly this experiment does not get much better from hereon out. This is also fortunately the most flat that it will look. I wanted to get the general shape and color down with the eyedropper tool and shape builder tool

This isn't the image I wanted to share of draft two, but it forgot to save these in stages. You can see here that I have started adding gradients as advised by some of my peers but it still doesn't look great. I also tried to throw the metal clasps in. This was very clunky, and I was called out for how basic the shapes are, I do fix this to an extent as well as the coloration needing to have more than two tones. You can see that I drew this with a grid in the background, this was mostly to give me more of a tactile background so I could better see where my shapes end.

Again we have the issue of only having screenshots from before, but I wanted to show that I made some changes to the clasps and they still suck, I went back and reviewed some of the notes several times before at last coming to... what I had when I ran out of time. I did what I could, and well... scroll down, and you'll see.

I spent a lot of time reworking the metal the shape and more importantly the colors, I was shown how my coloration was flawed in that it cut to hard white which is a limitation of the camera washing out and not what metal would look like, I took it in a more yellow direction which I feel makes it look much more like a reflection rather than a cut to white, you can also see the specific bending of color around the bottom of the watch. After I got those things done I reached out to some folks about what the most glaring issues might be which was that the face felt very flat in comparison to the rest of the metal around it, this was handled with some shadows around the hands and the ticks. A glass panel was added on top with a reflector at the very top to match the light source. It isn't going to fool anyone for longer than a momentary glance, but it is much better than I ever thought I could do with Illustrator and the things that I have learned will make me faster and better in everything that I do going forward. I cut the knob on the side and am missing some depth in the band, but looking at how I began and where I am now I would say that it was time well spent.