Drawing your own jewellery designs

“But I can’t draw!”
“I don’t have any ideas!”

This is something I hear often when asking people to sketch out their jewellery designs on paper but in reality a drawing jewellery is often done just to get an idea across.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a stick drawing or a masterful photo-realistic work of art -it’s not the product, merely a representation of what the piece will be like when it’s made.

Drawings are used to convey:

It is widely accepted that sketching out ideas is a great way to progress the design, or solve a problem – regardless of your area of business.

I like to work directly with metal and shape it into what I see in my minds eye. My husband is different, he prefers to sketching things out in pencil or iPad and play with shapes, textures and layers to firm up an idea. If you’ve decided to design your own piece of jewellery, you may prefer to draw it out too.

The drawing is not that hard. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough for you to turn your idea into reality or get your point across. If a stick figure drawing does this, then that’s great. If you have to draw it out in photo-realism, then that’s fine too.

Here’s a video by @ArtFadil which shows how far y0u can go with it. Great to watch for inspiration but even something more along the lines of a stick drawing can convey enough meaning to get the job done.

In this blog post we’ll start to look at how to how to generate ideas, in a way that is fun, creative and part of the solution-finding process. Be warned, if you’re starting out making your own jewellery, you may draw something that is very hard to make but it’s still part of the fun and learning.

You’ll start to get a feel for what is possible with the metals as your jewellery making experience increases, and you start to incorporate it into your designs so that it’s easier to make.

Choose a topic

For this exercise I’ll be doing a pendant with a Rennie MacIntosh-style inspired horse theme to it.

So get onto Google and do a search for “horse head”.

Looking good so far, but there’s one further down that catches my eye.
Get down the basic shapes

Next is to get a feel for the shapes so I’d simplify them a bit and start thinking about how they will translate into metal.

Simplify, Structure, Surface

Simplify some of the ideas and start thinking how to depict the shape while still having enough material to support the elements. Make sure lines cross, meeting or otherwise join so that the pendant will not only hold together but will have enough strength to withstand daily wear.

Here are the ideas so far.

The dark areas will be the silver – note how there are a lot of spots touching and joining up to give the piece strength.

Procreate is a great app for drawing as you can smooth lines by holding down the pencil. This produces a cleaner looking drawing than freehanding it.

The ideas can then be refined even more, and then printed and transferred onto your piece of sterling silver sheet and then cut out with a piercing saw!

 Of course, now that we have a laser engraver, we convert them to vectors for a clean line and scaleability without a loss of quality. We can redraw or tidy up any drawing you supply and we can then use that for laser engraving.

Don’t forget, when you are designing a pendant, to add the bail or a hanging point and make sure you don’t have any silver pieces hanging in space, attached to nothing.

For a great video on drawing jewellery, have a look at Zachary DaCosta’s video:
Have a look at the student jewellery gallery to see some of the pieces students have made. A lot of these students said at the beginning that they weren’t artist and weren’t creative – an then went on to produce stunning pieces that they wore home as finished jewellery.

Here are some of our commission drawings to give you a feel for it.

Important! Save ALL your drawings and sketches, regardless of how good you think they are.

They become a valuable reference over time.