The task I set out to do here was recreate the watch shown on the far right. I wanted to test my ability to work with texture, gradients, clipping and opacity masks and also mimicking shapes exactly. I am going to be honest and say I thought this project was going to be a lot easier than it turned out to be, but alas, I was sadly mistaken.

I started my project off by sketching different elements of watches that I needed to practice. I tried to focus the most on where I would need to add shadows. I knew that adding shadows and highlights were going to be the determining factor in if I achieved photorealism or not.

Working on my marble effects and then applying them to my clipping masks with different transparencies was a big learning curve for me. The freeform gradient tool was incredibly beneficial but also fairly temperamental to me as a beginner. I had to go into Photoshop as well to get my marbling that ended up in my final project. 

What you see above is the marble that I ended up with. I dragged the colors using the eyedropper tool to make the marble have the exact colors and layered a pink marble, purple marble and blue marble on top of each other using "multiply" transparency. 

Another important aspect I used in my watch was adding a slight leather texture to my straps. My reference picture didn't seem to have too much on the straps but I didn't want mine to appear completely flat so I added a leather opacity mask with the opacity lowered down to about 12%. I think it added a nice layer of dimension. 

Above you can see that when I started with my gradients and shadows, I had a long ways to go. My metal connectors were either a flat cream, a ridiculous orange to white to black gradient, or a flat cream that slowly turned into a faded black. After some research I learned that gradients don't have to flow to black and I can use the eyedropper tool to match the dark color on my reference picture instead of resorting to black. The face of my watch also had its first shadow that ended up being done away with but was a good lesson. I once again learned that fading to black isn't the only option, let alone is typically not the best option. And on my top strap you can see my first attempt at shading my strap. I don't think it looked terrible but it was kind of flat and I just wasn't completely happy with it.

I personally think I had a lot of improvement from my initial run-in with shadows and highlights. I think with using transparencies more, not forcing every layer to be at 100% opacity, and with using the freeform gradient tool with more practice, I was able to mimic the shadows on my reference watch fairly well. One of my favorite parts of my watch is my time knob on the side. I created three separate ellipses, added a dark gradient line to each of them, made some of them a light cream and others a dark cream with orange undertones, aligned them together and then made them all about 60% opaque so that there were layers and dimension to my knob. I also made sure to reshape my metal connector pieces to be a little more realistic looking and not simple rounded rectangles. 

All-in-all I learned a great deal and I really enjoyed becoming more fluent in Adobe Illustrator!