Design your own jewelry and surpass the market

Work your way up, design your own jewelry with the best design advice. Find here the ultimate ideas and concepts on how to work with three-dimensional forms.

You will soon speak the language of three-dimensional design and in no time you’ll be making beautiful jewelry.

Design your own jewelry by appreciating the qualities of contrasting shapes and master the relationships between volumes or forms. You’ll get to grips with the use of rectilinear and curvilinear forms in this section. They both share the same basic relationships, proportions, axis and balance.

What is the main design concept when working with forms?

The best and easiest way to start arranging forms in space is by choosing dominant, subdominant and subordinate forms. You can study this idea in Greet (2002), where these design elements help the design and making of a spatial composition using three forms (rectilinear or curvilinear).

When you’ve had the chance to make several models of rectilinear and curvilinear forms, using cardboard or wood rectangles, cones, cubes, prisms, etc, arrange them in several compositions. When you design your own jewelry following the dominant, subdominant and subordinate concept you acquire a mental device to design anything.

How do you use the dominant, subdominant and subordinate concept?

The subordinate volume adds a third visual element and a different axis. Subordinate volumes should add to the spatial character and will complete the “wholeness”, the balance, of the design. It can be contrasting but complementary to the other two forms.

The harmonic arrangement of these three volumes must be viewed from many angles to check proportion, scale and balance.

When you start making your compositions with three forms, look at the whole work and have a good look at the overall proportion. Then check comparatively each form looking for complementarity and interest. Here you can compare a volume with the other two.

As you see the composition from all angles watch for uninteresting views and if so, rearrange your composition in another way until there’s a design unity.

Become aware of aesthetic relationships between the forms.

Design your own jewelry considering how the volumes are joined, how they touch one another.

Examine if there’s contrast between the forms, is there enough difference in shape and size between each form to achieve contrast?

Is the overall configuration pleasing to the eye?

You can also choose to use either the vertical or horizontal proportion in your design to organize your composition. Try to add the volumes in such a way that the whole unity appears as structural.

Each form should contribute to the whole.

You can also use the diagonal axis to give your jewelry designs extra interest. A dynamic proportion between forms will appear as soon as you start using curvilinear forms with the same dominant, subdominant and subordinate concept but in a diagonal visual tension.

Use the diagonal axis to create movement and three-dimensional qualities. The three curvilinear forms should be arranged in a dynamic relationship with a good proportion between the diagonal axes to give the design appropriate visual tension.

Look at the overall proportion. Check the negative space around and between your three forms. Become sensitive to the volume of air within which your design exists.

Remember that the diagonal axes also become directional forces, so make your design to suit your intentions.

What do you want the viewer to see? You can control how the design will be perceived.

Just like with the rectilinear forms, the composition of curvilinear forms should look structural. That is, it has to appear self-supporting, it must look like a structure and a unified design.

Design your own jewelry having in mind the dominant, subdominant and subordinate concept explained here. You can also design your own jewelry, following this concept, with metal sheet achieving wonderful designs by means of planes.

For ideas on how to use planes in jewelry design, check out this section here.

I hope the dominant, subdominant and subordinate concept may ease your design experiments. There’s no need to use only three volumes or forms when you design your own jewelry. The concept is useful as a design resource to achieve beauty, balance, proportion and harmony.

Whenever you’re designing your jewelry, have in mind the relationships between volumes and forms.

Take this further by changing your own position as a viewer.

Stand up and see the composition from above. Take two steps back from your work and look at it with a bit of distance, look at it from all sides and from the bottom.

If you get used to looking at your work in different angles besides the way you view it from the bench, the design can speak to you tons!

In another section you can also see how concavity and convexity lead your designs into the world of organic forms.

Click here to go to the concavity and convexity section for a quick tour.

Go from Design Your Own Jewelry back to Design Basics Plus.

References used in this section: Greet (2002)