Creative Channels for Designing Your Jewelry - Part 1

How often I have heard “I know in my imagination what I want, I can picture it, but I can’t get it down on paper”. This is a pretty common expression by consumers who desire to design a custom piece of jewelry for themselves. They try sketching and then when they hit a roadblock, get frustrated and give up all attempts at creating their dream jewel.

Well I have good news; you do not need to be an artist to be inspired. You need creative channels to inspire you towards the end result, which is your ideal custom design special piece.

So where do you begin? Where is the starting point?

Look through fashion and jewelry magazines. You may notice a certain setting that is exactly what you want, while in another publication, you may see the right shank—call it a mixed bag of designs or as my Hungarian background would say, “a good goulash”. In other words, you can see bits and pieces of features that appeal to you in certain pieces of jewelry that can then be executed into one design. I can tell you one thing, designing the specific piece is not done overnight, it can take weeks, months and even years.

As you begin to cut out pictures, store them in a scrap book or folder and as you come across more pictures just keep adding them to your collection. You may come across other designs that appeal and get you excited and as you continue to find more designs, you might choose to scrap others that you have collected previously.

If you don’t collect magazines, then your computer will be you next best source. As you find pieces, that you like, bookmark them or print them up. Let’s say you are interested in a sporty ring, Google, “sporty rings”, it will yield multitudes of pages which you can print up and collect.

Has your library card been gathering some dust? You will have a pleasant surprise when you visit your local library and see their collection of books on jewelry. You have to decide what style, type and era of jewelry you are looking for. If you want your jewelry to be inspired from a certain time period, you may explore books that focus on a certain genre or style, i.e. Modernistic, Art Deco or Victorian.

Carrying a small camera or your phone’s camera can often capture the right picture at the perfect moment. You may see a person wearing an extraordinary piece of jewelry, or you may pass a jewelry shop window and see a piece that attracts you—you can instantly capture it all with a single click. Your camera can also capture images of objects, animals, foliage, landscapes—anything that can inspire a shape, theme or color.

If you travel to different countries you can be influenced by their own jewelry designs. So many countries have their own distinctive design concepts—you will definitely want to capture those on film.

Now if you can draw a little, then buy a good sketch pad and when a creative moment strikes you, fill that pad with shapes and textures. You may have bursts of ingenious creativity; use those moments passionately and let the creativity in you flow.