Premier designs jewelry with YOUR unique style

Take your premier designs jewelry to the limit.

Accentuate your jewelry with voluptuous shapes and magnificent volumes. Your designs idea can become original wearable sculptures.

Learn the subtle power of convexity and concavity.

Organic forms have long been one of the most popular shapes for jewelry design. Here you’ll find the design method to acquire expertise in handling mass, volume and space.

When making your premier designs jewelry with volume in mind, think about how the mass of your design creates surfaces and how these in turn result in a silhouette. Check this Barbara Hepworth sculpture.

This means that you can think about volume from the inside out, instead of the other way round.

We usually analyze and express volume starting from the outside and then getting inside the mass.

If you think of it the other way round, you’ll perceive form in a much better way.

Convexity is perceived as a positive volume that pushes into a negative space. Concavity is the expression of negative space pushing into positive volume. They both complement each other and structure one another.

Exploring the negative space between positive forms will help you see the whole character, position and tension of your design.

You can also group two or three masses and add them to make a new abstract volume, like grouping little masses of clay together into a coherent whole.

The dominant, subdominant and subordinate concept we saw before comes into play here again. For a quick reminder go here. Work with the axis of your design, in terms of structuring three-dimensionally the mass, volume and space.

Look at your sculptural design from all possible angles.

Study how the viewers’ eyes are drawn around, over and under your design.

The negative space should flow around the volume, at first, keep concavities subtle.

Practice to mentally “see” the structuring elements of your design, those inside the outer surface, like an X-ray of your volumetric creation.

That means to look for the directional axis, or lines that structure the whole mass. Examine the surfaces that protrude and move to see if they are consistent with the axis and the planes that build up the volume.

Explore these relationships while you turn the design around.

Understand the internal movement of your design; concavities also have axis, direction and tension. Negative space becomes as important as the mass. Try not to see your design as figures and surfaces but as an abstraction of forces and tensions, just like Henry Moore did so well.

By turning around our conception of mass and volume, the overall result of your premier designs jewelry should look “larger” than the form you started out with.

The complementarity between positive form and negative space adds up to the dynamic tension across space.

This section is very useful when making premier designs jewelry with the lost wax casting method. There’s plenty of plastic freedom with this method but you can also achieve great results by traditional jewelry making methods.

This is also true if you’re working with other jewelry materials such as resin or precious metal clay.

While designing with a sculptural twist in mind, don’t forget to check the elements and principles of design section to build upon what has been said in this page.

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