The art of jewelry making is a multifaceted process that requires a keen understanding of metallurgy, gemology, and business practices. Whether you’re starting your own jewelry business or simply want to improve your hand-crafted designs, there are many easy tools and techniques that will help you achieve better results.
The jewelery Design field blends the design ideation and development processes with traditional jewelry fabrication skills and techniques, such as wax sculpting, soldering, bending, and stone setting. The major is designed to prepare students for positions as professional jewelers, designers, and artisans or as self-employed studio artists. FIT’s Jewelry Design faculty are industry professionals who bring their firsthand knowledge of today’s market into the classroom and serve as mentors for students to find their own niche in this competitive, highly specialized field.
Unity is a feeling of cohesiveness that unifies the diverse elements in a piece of jewelry to create a holistic look. This can be achieved through the use of consistent color, texture, and shape selection. Repetition of motifs and patterns can also promote unity, as well as the careful consideration of proportion and scale to ensure that components relate appropriately.
Emphasis is a visual cue that draws attention to a particular element of a jewelry piece. Strategic use of contrasting colors or textures can highlight distinctive gemstones, while the careful positioning of ornate metalwork as framing can lend an inherent weight to intended focal points. The choice of size can also lend emphasis, as larger stones naturally draw the eye. Dramatic slopes and peaks can also direct the eye toward a particular area of the piece, creating an inherent visual hierarchy.
3D software is an essential tool for jewelry design, enabling designers to quickly create detailed, one-of-a-kind pieces. There are several 3D modeling and sculpting programs to choose from, including free open-source options such as Blender or TinkerCAD. For more complex jewelry designs, paid software such as RhinoGold or JewelCAD offers a comprehensive design solution with output that is compatible for CNC machining and rapid prototyping.
For those who have never used a 3D program before, there is a user-friendly jewelry-specific software called SelfCAD that is inexpensive but also powerful. It has a drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy to use, and it also features a large library of jewel-related shapes.
ZBrush is an unbeatable option for sculpting and generating organic forms, but it can be a little difficult to learn. It can be frustrating to get a hang of the software, but once you master it, your jewelry designs will come to life. In addition to its sculpting and rendering capabilities, ZBrush has extensive polygonal modeling tools that can be fine-tuned to create precision and accuracy. It is also one of the most affordable programs for creating a realistic jewelry model. It has a partnership with Sculpteo, allowing users to directly export their 3D models and print them with ease.
