[Catfish]

In my second effort to try & remember how to draw again, I'm trying to draw my watch. And boy, am I finding it tricky...

I'm trying to keep this a bit neater than the last effort - my current plan is to get its outline in Illustrator, then finish in PS.

The watch is heavy metal - lots of well defined edges, and some very tricky curves. I'm drawing it from an angle as well, which isn't helping. It looks something like this:


So has anyone got any tips on drawing artificial objects like this? Because it's so tightly designed, it's very obvious when I draw a line out of place.
How do you do your work in Illustrator? Carry on sketching away with the pencil tool, making lots and lots of tiny corrections? Or would you try & get the base shape with the ellipse tool? I would've thought the latter, but I'm finding that I have to hand tweak the curves endlessly to correct for perspective and so on.

Any tips?
Thanks
Cat

[somkeat]

I really love your watch. Looks so realistic. If you could help me for how you could do that, I would really appreaciate.

My paint is here.

Maiya

My lighting is not there yet. still learning. Please help.

[Asurfael]

ehm... I think that's a real watch and he's asking for help on how to draw that? it's not a realistic watch, but a real watch (slap me if i'm wrong it's 6.30 am here so i'm not maybe on my brightest...)

[somkeat]

I think you are right...

But how about my paint? Please comment or critc.

[Catfish]

Yes, I'm afraid that's a photo. That would've been a slightly easier angle to draw it from - I'm drawing it lying down on the table in front of me, so slightly above and to the side.

[zak]

thats a very pretty piccy somkeat, however you should post it on finished pieces and not in someone elses thread. ^__^

[somkeat]

ah.. I'm sorry about that. I forgot about that...

[Frog]

My approach would be to sketch out on paper first. I use illustrator a lot, but I treat it as an "inking" tool (which it is great at), for actual drawing paper is still better for me, or if you really want to do it all on the computer maybe sketch it in Painter.

So what I would suggest is to work out a few roughs on paper, the more you do the better they will get, and then when you have one that is ok - it doesn't have to be perfect, or even very neat - scan it and take it into illustrator to clean it up. I just think that illustrator is a great rendering tool, but not a great "working out your ideas" tool. Hope that makes sense

[Catfish]

Yeah, that's what I figured. Unfortunately, I don't have a scanner...

Hmmm - I'll see if I can borrow a friends sometime - thanks for the advice.