I don’t know why, but we have strange customers from time to time. For example, there was an old lady who came to our office a few weeks ago. She brought a broken sand clock and said that she wanted to replace it with a new one. And she showed me a receipt from WalMart. “Umm, … You are at a wrong place, old lady,” I said. Then she stared at me. I didn’t know what to say. Eventually, I said that I could design a new one digitally using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop CS2. Then she nodded and smiled. Well, you know… As I always do, I launched Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop on my iMac. In a matter of 12 minutes or so, I created a brand-new sand clock for her.

The following tutorial shows steps to design a sand clock, using Adobe Illustrator CS2 and Photoshop CS2. Note that the screenshots below are extracted from a tutorial video with PNG compression. Therefore, their quality may not be the best.

1. Using Adobe Illustrator CS2, let’s use Ellipse Tool (L) to draw a right circle, holding down the Shift key. The fill color should be none, and select a light gray color for stroke.
2. Next, grab Scissors Tool, and cut the shape at the top and bottom anchor points. Then delete the right half.
3. Let’s turn this 2D shape into a 3D shape looking like a sand clock. Apply 3D > Revolve to the shape.
4. We want to create another shape with Illustrator. Use Ellipse Tool to draw a vertically-short ellipse. Then use gray gradient colors to fill the shape.
5. You want to turn this 2D shape into a 3D shape as well by applying 3D > Extrude & Bevel.
6. Okay. That’s it with Illustrator. Let’s import them to Photoshop with Pixels Paste. Adjust the position and the size of the second shape to make it the top of the sand clock.
7. You are using gray gradient colors to fill the lid. That means you can apply Colorize under Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. So let’s colorize it. When you are finished, duplicate the layer and take it to the bottom of the sand clock.
8. The next stage is to fill the first Illustrator shape with sand. Make a selection for sand and then fill it with sheer black. Furthermore, apply Noise and a small amount of Gaussian Blur.
9. There should be more dark pixels than bright ones inside the selection. So let’s apply Adjustments > Invert to the selection. Then use Adjustments > Hue/Saturation to colorize gray pixels.
10. Similarly, make another selection for the bottom chunk of sand, apply Noise, Gaussian Blur, Invert and Hue/Saturation.

Video tutorial with no audio commentary

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Illustrator and Photoshop CS2 are products of Adobe Systems Incorporated.