Surface Lines in Jewelry Design

While lines in jewelry design are often used to create movement or to guide a viewer’s eye around a piece, lines can do more. Artists can use lines to enhance or emphasis a surface. Continue reading

Guiding Lines in Jewelry Design

One of the most common uses of line in design is to gently (or not so gently) tug the viewer’s eye in a guided tour of the work. They can do this because lines usually have direction. They lean forward or back. They curl around, widen and thin. Artists can use this directional tendency to tell the viewer: “See this? Now, see this? Now look over here.” Continue reading

What Makes “Line” in Jewelry Design?

Floating Free by Betty Helen Longhi

Ridge peaks and places where two dissimilar materials meet are seen as lines. Floating Free, by Betty Helen Longhi. Courtesy of the artist.

Line is the most individual of marks. It is the first mark we make as children. Lines are the result of movement—stick in the sand, pen on paper. Because we each move with a different type and level of intention, a different force–whether we’re talking with our hands or doing daily chores–each of us draws or writes with a different line quality. In fact, the lines we make are so intimately tied to our unique ways of moving, that each of us has a unique signature, used for centuries for identification. Although how long that will last in a digital age is anyone’s guess. Continue reading

What Are the Elements and Principles of Design?

There are two aspects to aesthetic design. First there are the elements of design (line, shape, form, space, texture, color, and—I believe when it comes to jewelry–light). These are the building blocks of design, like construction materials, cooking ingredients, or vocabulary. Then there are the principles of design (unity, variety, repetition, balance, contrast, and scale) which are guidelines to putting the elements together, like a blueprint, recipe, or rules of grammar. Continue reading

Why Learn a Formal Design Language?

The best way to learn design is to look closely and analytically at the work of other artists—specifically, here, other jewelry makers. But for beginners, without the language to describe the formal qualities of design, how do you analyze the work? “I like it/I don’t like it/It’s good/It’s not good” is certainly a start, but then comes the question: Why? What makes it good or not good? Why does it hold your attention or not, stop your breath or not? And there, without a formal language, most analysis stops.

By the way, the term “formal” in this context doesn’t mean classical, high-falutin’ or dressed up. It refers to the elements and principles of design from which “forms” are made, things like line, shape, space, balance, size and so on. Without a grasp of formal language, what can often happen is that a beginner, looking at other work, ends up simply copying or imitating it. The derivative work is almost always weak and less than it might have been. Worse, it is never truly one’s own.

(And if you believe the old saw that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” it isn’t. It usually just ticks off the original artist or, if terribly blatant and if you start selling the work, can end up in a lawsuit. Now inspiration, that is a sincere form of flattery.)

This talk of language, vocabulary, structure and form may sound like an academic discussion, but it really—as I finally found, after years of trying to ignore it–is not. Although artists express their ideas through various media–pigment for a painter, clay for a potter, music for a composer, or metal for a metalsmith or jeweler–we are still language-using creatures. We depend on language to describe, explore, and even, to some extent, create our world—even to ourselves. In fact, sometimes our understanding of our world and of ideas is limited by existing language.

Which brings me to the amazing metalsmith Heikki Seppä, who discovered, or rediscovered, this when he began introducing his students to his ground-breaking concept of shell forms to his students.

The Importance of Design Language: A Revelation

Learning to draw was a revelation to me. As a child, I thought you either did or did not have the talent to draw. I was convinced I did not have it, although I kept taking workshops and classes to try to learn. Finally, in my 30s, I took a workshop from the brilliant and inspiring art teacher, Beverly Cassel. Beverly taught me that it was not a matter of talent. It was a matter of learning to see.

Yes, well that only took me so far. My drawings kept failing. Much as I respected Beverly, she must have been wrong and I really was missing the talent.

But I kept taking classes.

Including one that covered the elements and principles of design. I’d like to say the light came on. It didn’t. Because learning about line, form, balance, blah, blah, was like practicing scales: you know you should but…why? Can’t you just move ahead and play?

THEN (drum roll), I got into a workshop where we did a critique. This time, the brilliant painter and teacher Eileen Cotter Howell helped me discover how these basics could be applied to actually evaluate and improve my work. By employing the language of design, I could see my work—and that of others–in a new way. The lights finally, after I will not tell you how many years, came on. (I never said I was a quick study.)

Over the last many, many years, it’s been my privilege to interview and see the breathtaking work of a huge number of brilliant jewelry artists. And I’ve come to realize that they employ the elements and principles of design. I wondered to myself, how many beginning jewelry makers, like me those many years ago, keep wondering why their work fails? Even when they copy the work of those brilliant jewelry artists.

Part of the answer, I think, may lie in the fact that many jewelry makers start their work without a structured art background—most art programs teach the elements and principles of design. Jewelry makers may start their work as a hobby, beading, or working with metal clays, or wire wrapping. They may take a class on metalsmithing and get stoked the first time the metal melts under their torch. Other jewelers learn on the job, at a bench, doing repairs, casting, or other jewelry work.

When you learn to cast, forge, solder, set, string beads, wrap wire, or work with precious metal clay (PMC), you come to grips with one aspect of jewelry making—that of tools, techniques, methods and manufacturing. (Like managing paint, ink, or heaven forbid, glue.) But, like me, you may not know there is, or how to apply, a design language.

When jewelry makers talk about design, they are often talking about how the object functions. Designing jewelry that functions well–a ring that doesn’t roll, earrings that are comfortable, or a catch that opens easily, but doesn’t open at the wrong time—is certainly one type of design. But here I’m talking about aesthetic design: Is there enough (or too much) contrast between these two textures; does this large pearl balance this selection of colored stone melee; is the work visually appealing, or even exciting. To answer (or even ask) these questions, artists of all kinds, I think, can be helped by learning the language of aesthetic design.

Knowing the language of design helped me become a better painter/drawer, whatever it is I really do. But because I’ve spent so much of my life associated with jewelry, I wanted to help jewelry makers, who may not be familiar with it, to learn to this language. Hopefully, it will help them see ways they might apply it to their own work.

As a result, with the enthusiasm of a convert, I began writing Good Bones: the Elements and Principles of Design for Jewelry Makers. Since life and work keep getting in the way, I decided to blog some of this information so that it can begin helping people until I can get the book finished.

I hope this will prove useful to you.