I love AVI-8 watches. I've owned my Hawker Hurricane watch for about 2 years now and I wear it everywhere. It looks great no matter what I'm wearing and fits just right. To test my Adobe Illustrator skills I decided to create a photorealistic vector graphic of my watch. I wanted to get it looking so real that you could hardly tell the difference between my vector graphic and a real photo of the watch. I started by heading to AVI-8's website and grabbing a photo of my watch.

https://www.avi-8nation.com/collections/hawker-hurricane/products/av-4011-01-hawker-hurricane-watch-white

Then I began sketching.

I first wanted to draw out different components of the watch with pen and paper to get a feel for the different shapes that I was going to be vectorizing. One of the trickiest parts was the different gradients and shading shifts on the outer casing of the watch. I inspected closely and tried to work out ways that I could create these different shapes in vector format and then I got to work in Illustrator on my first draft.

After many hours of work and frustration. I achieved the result above and submitted it to some of my peers for feedback. The feedback was positive and encouraging. I got some good advice on how to achieve a more realistic look with using shadows, highlights, and textures. The hardest part for me was working out the leather straps. Fortunately the critiques steered me in the right direction and I continued working using plenty of gradients, textures, gaussian blur, and opacity masks. 

Behold the final result:

I feel I achieved what I set out to do. I created a vector graphic version of my favorite watch and the results are nearly indistinguishable from the original photo without zooming in extremely close and checking the details. The most satisfying part of the process was seeing what I am capable of. This is no doubt the most difficult Illustrator project I've set out to do, but it's definitely the most rewarding as well. 

Here's a side-by-side with the original photo: