Discover The Collaboration Between Farer And The Dial Artist

Behind The Scenes | 06 Nov

To accompany the launch of the Lissom Collection earlier this year, we collaborated with the talented Chris Alexander, aka The Dial Artist, to produce five Lissom “pieces uniques”.

Chris is a British artist based in Scotland. He has a Master's in Design from Gray’s School of Art and has become known for producing intricate hand-painted custom dial art. Having started The Dial Artist in 2017, Chris has produced many unique works for private clients and watch brands, injecting each with his signature contemporary art style.    

A central theme of the Lissom collection was the use of bold, organic colours, and it was because of this that each watch was named after a famous British botanist. 

We wanted our collaboration with Chris to reflect this, so we explored the best way to achieve it through dial art. After some creative discussion, we decided to play into the bold colours of the base models by creating a flower motif based on the 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine, which starred the Beatles and was based around their album of the same name. 

It’s an art style that exudes the whimsy and colour of the 1960s whilst also being distinctly British, and that made it the perfect fit for the new Lissom collection. 

In order to replicate the artwork by hand across five different watches, Chris first created the artwork digitally. This was then transformed into a UV-printed graphic that could be applied to each dial. Chris then painted each dial by hand using cold-cure enamel paints. By using this technique, he was able to ensure that the design was consistent across each dial, whilst also allowing him to tweak the colours to suit each watch. 

Though this process might sound relatively straightforward, it took Chris around 8 hours to complete each dial, and it requires an immense amount of skill and concentration to paint each dial so precisely. 

The results reflect Chris’s hard work, with each piece offering their five lucky owners a watch that’s unlike any other Farer out there.