Inspired by this amazing thread, I've decided to focus my attention for my own attempt at dial printing on recreating a model from my birth year, 1964. I found some great high res reference for a '64 5513 sold through an online watch auction house that I can use for source material. It has a gilt no date dial, meters first.
I have a graphic design background and have been using Illustrator and Photoshop since they were first released. A year or so ago I designed and created the artwork for a set of instruments for my friend and colleague who was hand building a car - a project that I enjoyed immensely. So naturally I had already been wondering if recreating a watch dial was a feasible project, before I came across this thread. I've begun dabbling in "vintegizing" rep Rolex, and this will add to that (if I can manage to pull it off).
I'd like to thank you Bart for your templates - they're an amazingly useful starting point for this project and give me a really good positioning guide for the elements I'm generating. What I've started to do now is use the very high-res dial photos I've sourced to recreate all the printed elements of the dial as Adobe Illustrator vector artwork. I can then either print the vector art directly onto the waterslide decal film, or rasterize it in order to introduce "noise" to whatever degree looks right (along with discolouration of the dial).
I'm starting with the depth rating and word Submariner. When you get in close, it's fascinating to see the hand drawn characters on these dials. For instance, in the first line, every zero is a subtly different shape. It'll take a few hours to hand draw these using the pen tool to outline each character and mess with the curves to get the tracing close enough that I'm happy with it. Here we go..!
I have a graphic design background and have been using Illustrator and Photoshop since they were first released. A year or so ago I designed and created the artwork for a set of instruments for my friend and colleague who was hand building a car - a project that I enjoyed immensely. So naturally I had already been wondering if recreating a watch dial was a feasible project, before I came across this thread. I've begun dabbling in "vintegizing" rep Rolex, and this will add to that (if I can manage to pull it off).
I'd like to thank you Bart for your templates - they're an amazingly useful starting point for this project and give me a really good positioning guide for the elements I'm generating. What I've started to do now is use the very high-res dial photos I've sourced to recreate all the printed elements of the dial as Adobe Illustrator vector artwork. I can then either print the vector art directly onto the waterslide decal film, or rasterize it in order to introduce "noise" to whatever degree looks right (along with discolouration of the dial).
I'm starting with the depth rating and word Submariner. When you get in close, it's fascinating to see the hand drawn characters on these dials. For instance, in the first line, every zero is a subtly different shape. It'll take a few hours to hand draw these using the pen tool to outline each character and mess with the curves to get the tracing close enough that I'm happy with it. Here we go..!
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