I just wanted to draw a watch

This is not an AI generated image nor 3D render.

I love looking at some unrealistically realistic renders. 3D software has come a long way since I was in school noodling on solid works and pirated versions of 3DSmax back in 2010. We can now design impressive stuff right in our browsers with spline, vectary to name the few I tried. While this is very neat and empowering, 3D is a specialty. Nothing replaces expertise and specialized tools. I got caught by the gospel of democratization making me think I could « add 3D to my skill set ». Over the years I indulged in many personal experiments that lead me today to acknowledge that it’s just not my thing, even when I want to visualize something in 3D.

That why I come back to figma which with a couple shapes, gradients, masks and strokes gets me 90% of the way.

Everyone recommended that I give mid-journey a try. I have not. It would get the fun of making a thing. I get it, the creative process can be a torture and tools like AI can help speed things up. But this logic sounds like a slippery slope to outright denial of what creativity is at the core. To make something good it has to take something. More than a prompt. A bit of struggle is what shapes us as human, as designers too.

In the case of my silly side projects like here, it would be a shortcut that would cut the process so significantly that it would remove the meaning from the act. There isn’t much to begin with. I just wanted to draw a watch while noodling on the topics of 3D and AI…