Hi all! Some of you may know me from the Watchmaker Premium community, but I’m new to Facer. I’m a professional jazz guitar player in North Carolina, USA who began the all-consuming hobby of watch face making about two years ago shortly after getting my first smart watch (Samsung Frontier). I now also have a Fossil Gen 5 and a Huawei Watch 1, and in a couple of weeks I’ll have a Summit 2 
I’ve always dabbled with Photoshop and I’ve also always enjoyed having another creative outlet outside of music, so once I had made my first face (a Parmigiani Fleurier replica) I was hooked.
In the last two years I’ve honed my craft and learned about mechanical watches through making nearly 200 replicas. In the beginning I would cut/restore photos of real watches to build the face. But after a short while I began to draw more of the elements in Photoshop. And then finally I got to the point where the real enjoyment and challenge for me was to do everything from scratch in Photoshop and try to make it look photorealistic. So now every last pixel of every face I make is drawn from nothingness in Photoshop.
I took it a step further after a few months and started designing original designs and launched a brand I call B Sharp. The simple philosophy of B Sharp is to bring the aesthetics of high end luxury mechanical watches to the smart watch, and also try to capture the aura of “hand made” by giving meticulous attention to every last detail. (I read once about a particular watch that 40 man hours were spent on just polishing the tourbillon bridge!) Mercifully Photoshop is more forgiving but I have been known to spend 1 or 2 hours and use 8 or 10 Photoshop layers just to draw a tiny screw head
I kind of stumbled into Facer through the Montblanc contest. I created and submitted 2 designs, and was thrilled to have one among the winners! While I was waiting for the results I decided to try to rebuild a couple of my original B Sharp designs from the Watchmaker platform to Facer. I’ll make those available soon but I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to continue here on Facer, I like the platform but to be honest I do believe the Watchmaker platform is still much more powerful at this stage, and I’m also not sure I get/agree with the pricing scheme here. Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but I don’t quite get why I’d have to pay a subscription to unlock features in the creator app. Seems like having to pay to provide Facer content which they use to sell more premium subscriptions (but still not be able to sell my own work) is not the fairest.
Anyway, I’ve been lurking here for a bit and it does seem like a great community and I see some talented designers so I’ll probably stick around!
If I can figure out how to attach pictures I’ll add a couple to this post
