The starting point here is a holiday: Rexx Timepieces set out to make a dial for Rosh Hashanah, drawing on honey, bees and hive geometry. That brief produced a brass watch face covered in hexagonal cells with a small stylized bee worked into the pattern, and it is a lovely match of theme and object.
The construction is what grabs me. Instead of engraving the artwork down into the surface, a fiber laser stripped away the metal around it, so the honeycomb outlines and the bee stand proud of a single piece of brass. A laser engraver etched and cut the circular blank to begin with, and the edges were then filed with a round needle file. Hand finishing followed: a grade 1000 sanding stick on the raised surfaces, a flat metal tool to polish them, and a cleaning in soapy water before an airbrush laid down the black coating. Tweezers lifted the masking layer away to reveal bright brass lines against the recessed cells.
Two versions came out of this. One keeps a clean dark background; the other scatters a sparkly splash effect inside the cells, giving a gold-flecked look around the center hole and the one solid brass hexagon. Notably, there are no conventional hour markers at all, so the honeycomb simply runs across the whole face, which is a bold call in my view.
The open question is the one the maker put to viewers: would you pick the clean finish or the sparkly one? I keep going back and forth myself.
Project by Rexx Timepieces. Watch it on their YouTube channel: