Time in Rose Gold

This project was to create a photo-realistic watch. Success comes from attention to the details and focusing on how shadows and and highlights work together.

I found a photo of an Olivia Burton matte rose gold watch and started to sketch the little details and the shadows to get an idea of the shapes within the watch and how the shadows are shaped.

I started with just plain tick marks as well as just getting the shapes before I added more detailed shadows. I realized I wanted the little raised hour marks like the reference photo and I ended up adding them. It was hard to look at one image and recreate it perfectly. There was a lot of trial and error.

The crown was one of the hardest parts of this project. I greatly disliked the beginning of it, as seen in the image above, so I decided to find a different crown reference to recreate. I went with a smooth matte crown to match the aesthetic of my watch body.

Finding those tiny shadows and deciding how to show the depth of objects and the angles at which they face toward or away from the light is a tricky and time consuming process. I hadn't paid much attention to how light plays off an object in such meticulous ways until this project.

This has been one of the hardest projects I have ever done but I can say that I love how it turned out. Through the use of gradients, blurs, opacity masks, clipping masks and simply taking the time to see the little things, this watch has come together in a beautiful, realistic way. It's ironic that within this watch project, the biggest factor was the time put into it.