Preparing Graphics

First of all, you need to take pictures of the object of desire and process them. Your graphics tool of choice needs to allows you to cut and paste areas, and handle transparency.

The Watch Face

First of all, you need the main watch face, which is the background for it all. The tricky bit is, you need it without any hands on it. Unless you are a watchmaker who is confident to dis- and reassemble watches, that means taking multiple pictures at different times, so that eventually all bits of the face are uncovered. You can then cut and paste the uncovered bits into one magically hand-less watch.

It helps to do this with the camera on a tripod, and in artificial light, so that all the different shots are taken under exactly the same conditions.

The Hands

A hand is defined as anything that moves around a fixed axis; it could be a normal hand, or a disc. It has a position on the face, and a centre within the hand, where the axis is. These graphics need to fulfil two conditions:

• The image displays the hand in its null position (12 o'clock position)
• All the bits that are not displayed must be transparent (for example the green bits in the hand below). png is the recommended image format.

After the initial processing, that gives you something like this as raw material. The dates are still missing, we'll come to that later. Put all of your graphics in a folder that is a sub folder seen from the executable. Just mimic the shipped examples.

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