Basic guidelines for jewelry design

Jewelry Discussion
21

Ted,
Very cool clock! Did your client throw any concept at you other than the clock… or did the heraldic design accompany the client input?
Platers, powder coaters & the like can really mess with a project budget and very often :nauseated_face: do not do the greatest job. Plating is not solid metal. It looks good for a while… and then, over time… not so good. I’ve discovered that the more cool the design, the more inclined written bids by subs get tossed out the window and they don’t honor their written word, even though the description was dead on accurate. There’s a tendency to try to ride on someone else’s coattails.
No, I haven’t built a house YET (i have great landlords and cheap rent in a nice area), but I’ve rebuilt, remodeled, problem solved and developed architectural projects over 35 plus years (several restaurants, a bridge, lots of architectural lighting, a couple of police memorials). I have am interest in history preservation that started in my college years. My parents home was an extraordinary mid century modern residence and it set the bar in my lifelong appreciation for design and build. I also spent a decade with Disney making strange things at the park. After learning from and working with just about every building craft, and trying to figure out ahead of time how to preempt vandalism by thoughtful design, designing to make things lovely and functional becomes part of your morphed DNA. Just because things have been done a certain way traditionally, does not mean that it is still the most efficient approach. I look at projects with a clean mental slate.
Right now its redoing one of my studios after a two week flood while I was out of town. I almost planned for it in my last major upgrade/ remodel, so no equipment was lost or damaged, but drying it out is a royal pain. I couldn’t even go in it for a month as the fans blew 24-7. Arrrgh. Water likes to go EVERYWHERE - slow and insidious saturation. Funniest thing was I emptied all the trash baskets the night before we left and when we returned… one basket that had been strategically placed, though not planned for the disaster contained about 10" of water. I laughed and smiled, WOW! Nice catch :slight_smile:
I am in the process of seriously considering designing both new studios and a home for upcoming retirement relocation in WA state using shipping containers and custom metals. The properties in the area are skyrocketing and it makes financial and design need sense. My partner, a software engineer actually likes my idea. He’s not a builder or maintenance guy, more a total geek. My brain is percolating ideas like crazy. I sketch design ideas quite regularly, getting up in the middle of the night to catch my problem solving / designing dream process as it happens. My partner says “you need a barn”. He’s right.
You probably have built a fab space to live in and thru for your creative life!
Eileen

vladimirfrater
February 5 |

Hi Eileen,
Well! thanks
for such a full description of your gate making project.
It all starts in ones head,ive found.
Also, I should have guessed, laser profiling, is the way to go for such intricate designs.
I too used it for making the millenium clock project (yr 2000) for a livery Co in the city of London, UK.
Heres I regret a poor pic of it. Cant find the file just now.
The center clock face is some 14in in dia, and laser profiled out of s/steel for stability reasons and was then gold plated along with the leopard neck chains . the plating alone was over $1000.00
Leopards carved in lime wood, salts and crest cast aluminium, and the MM in s/steel as well, clock hands in titanium. The base is rock salt which i carved! quite soft in fact, and it came from the Isralei Dead sea salt pans.

Overall width some 4ft 6in , and it was all digitised one for one off the drawings to a dxf files on an a1 digitiser. Weight around 75lbs.
Not the biggest project, that was my house I built myself in 1972. In it still!.
have you done any house building?
I wouldnt be surprised.
Ted.
Visit Topic or reply to this email to respond.
Brought to you by:

You are receiving this because you enabled mailing list mode.

To unsubscribe from these emails, click here.

22

Everything shrinks somewhat. It’s important to be predictive in what happens with the printing wax or resin, and with the chosen metal itself. If you plan on making a mold off the piece for production, that needs to be factored in for a second round of shrinkage.
Eileen

23

Hi Eileen,
This project came my way from a local clock maker who didnt know where or how to undertake this 3D rendering of what had always been a 2D printed and painted heraldic coat of arms.
The wardens wanted to commission this clock based on this coat of arms and supplied a coloured drawing with a basic specification as to size and finish…
From this i proposed a detailed production specification, how i would pull all the elements together, using the artisans whose specialised skills I didnt have.
they accepted my proposal and that proceeded all to plan.
funnily tho, the only let down was the clock mechanism for which I was not respnosible failed 2 months after installation.

As to the plating I specified 24microns or 1/1000th in in hard gold.
More than enough.
Re container homes,hmmm? I prefer all timber construction. Whats best for you has a lot to do with your annual climate fluctuations…
My parents built their home in 1955 after the 1930’s Bauhaus style from central Europe.
That won the architect a Canadian timber development award.
Stone with cedar elevations, and a low pitched roof in copper, now a lovely green.
Designated a listed building.
Still in the family.
Were off grid, isolated , nearest other homestead 1 mile away.
Own water supply from a spring. heaven on earth, !. As you suspected.
Ted.

.

24

Greetings,

I have been puzzled about the place of the craftsman in some of the work I see in the Art Journals, Vogue Magazine, College Catalogs, even tool supply catalogs. I find very often the photo comes with by-lines. One for the crafter and one for the designer. I don’t sell through Etsy and I present in only two Galleries. The bulk of my sales are at heavily juried craft and art shows where it is a requirement that the work sold be solely the work of the person behind the display. At one show a woman was asked not to apply again because what everyone thought was her hand work was actually her designs being built by an employee. Very good designs at that.

There is a fellow down the street who makes trophies and bric a brac with the help of a computer and a laser and a supply of redwood. The skill is in the equipment, the designs are in the soft ware. Is it art? Probably not but there is a market for those goods and he is supplying that market.

To me the design and the craft have to go hand in hand. I have to design around my limitations. What am I capable of doing. I work with some limited fine motor use of my hands caused by some severe injuries over the years. The reconstructions and re-attachments have allowed me to do some pretty cool things but working real small isn’t one of them. So I tend to design as simple statements. I use jigs. And with the exception of pin backs and ear nuts I make every component used in my jewelry. And over the years of crawling around shows I have found, early on, that I am not at all unique.

The second part of design basics would be learn to draw. With a pencil on paper. Draw the piece from all aspects just like in 10th grade drafting class. You may see the structural problems before they arise. Rob and I have both commented to each other over the years that we have pages of design sketches; the product of many staff meetings over the course of our working years.

The third basic to me is learn your materials and this would include using your tools I believe. How does metal move when heated. What is the process of sequential soldering? What do I polish and what do I leave in the rough.

My last design basic is this: Is the design safe to make and safe to wear.

Apologies if this sounded too much like a lecture. I think we all start at that basic level where by we heat and hit metal with hammers until we have something to be proud of.

My two cents.

Don Meixner

---- Eileen Webb orchid@ganoksin.com wrote:

25

I am fascinated to notice that a large amount of the comment I sent is not a part of what is posted. Would a forum moderator please remove this last posting of mine. Much of the context isn’t there for some reason and it makes little sense with out it.

thanks
Don Meixner
---- Don Meixner orchid@ganoksin.com wrote:

26

Don…I could see what appears to have been your entire post. It closes with “My two cents.”…Rob

27

Don, I am agreement with you to a large extent… but if you use any power tools that plug into a wall, that’s technology, even though purists don’t think of it as such. Because it’s easy to look at even the penultimate tool - the hammer and understand how you would use it, does not make it any less a “technology”. Time and familiarity with a technology devolves its mystery until it becomes a “tool” that is accepted and widely understood. Dxf files are kind of in the voodoo magic realm for most people.
I was chatting with the editor of a ny design magazine about 15 years ago. He asked me what I knew about “the hammer”. My response was “hand tool”. His retort still makes me laugh: "at the world expositions of Paris and London in the late 19th century, the United States of America exhibited special use hammers as (state of the art) technology. " My eyes got pretty big.
Edmond Faucé invented the welding torch in 1903, and it was immediately poo pood & widely shunned because it wasn’t traditional to forgework, collaring and riveting to secure metal work. It was embraced by Edgar Brandt in his metal studio. He made a bold comment to graduating students from a school in Paris - and incidentally, in 5 days and 5 more years, it will be a century " the more varied are out technical means, the greater the latitude offor expression… in order to create, the artist must make use of all the means that science places at his disposal: conserving or limiting oneself to the methods of times gone by is absurd. " The quote is the center premise of Joan Kahr’s book on Edgar Brandt. I’m sure he had a wicked trip hammer in his atelier. Is using a tiny foredom hammer piece a cheaters way out?
PAPER was more valuable than GOLD. Now it’s our greatest discarded item. I came from a traditional textile background, being able to card, spin, weave etc. I look at trees and plants and ponder, “would those cedar roots make a great basket, or would that plant make a lovely dye?” Technology and tools are truly interchangeable terms, and can do exactly the same end result, with mastery and accessibility. The machines ska tools I often use to cut me finely tweeked computer files cost in the range of $500,000 - 750,000. They are not something you just go out and buy. I just rent them by the hour. The quality of a artful computer file that buys access to $$$ machines at a reasonable and competitive cost is the art that is no different than fine hand craft. After 45+ years as a professional artist / designer / fabricator, in numerous media, I consider practicality partnered with an aesthetics idea. Personally, I don’t mass produce, its all one offs. It took 40 hours of my time to create that gate. My favorite vendors now send me their headache clients who want something that is a fit to my particular skills. From experience, if I had not mastered the programming end and developed a design process (which took THREE years to figure out), walking the concept thru more design programs than i care to think about and then double check them for the evil inevitablies that manufacturing software engineers designed into their “support” systems, NONE of my architectural metal projects would exist in any form except paper. Job shops want to run machines, not tweek complex files that cut one part for 8+ hours.
I treasure the aesthetic of fine traditional artisan crafts that express shallow arc geometry (curves). I’m an ornament junkie. I fit in a weird place, being simultaneously an aesthetic luddite and art fab futurist - depending on what I have in mind. I love carving waxes. And I use a heat power tool to facilitate it sometimes. I use both paper and pencil, and mouse and computer file interchangeably. They are grandpa and grandson spanning thousands of years. A computer design program does not not an artist make, any more than a camera makes one a great photographer. We adapt to some personal level of comfort and competency with the creation of our jewelry (or whatever) with whatever tool, technology or process that makes productive and aesthetic sense. If i handed a sketch to someone else to design into a computer or file format… It would not be my art / craft, much less art. And most sadly, I’d probably rework the whole thing to get exactly what i want.
I encourage creatives to expand their comfort zones. Mine started purely as a personal challenge, was it even possible? This is, of course, just one jeweller’s opinion.
Eileen

DonMeixner
February 5 |

Greetings,

I have been puzzled about the place of the craftsman in some of the work I see in the Art Journals, Vogue Magazine, College Catalogs, even tool supply catalogs. I find very often the photo comes with by-lines. One for the crafter and one for the designer. I don’t sell through Etsy and I present in only two Galleries. The bulk of my sales are at heavily juried craft and art shows where it is a requirement that the work sold be solely the work of the person behind the display. At one show a woman was asked not to apply again because what everyone thought was her hand work was actually her designs being built by an employee. Very good designs at that.

There is a fellow down the street who makes trophies and bric a brac with the help of a computer and a laser and a supply of redwood. The skill is in the equipment, the designs are in the soft ware. Is it art? Probably not but there is a market for those goods and he is supplying that market.

To me the design and the craft have to go hand in hand. I have to design around my limitations. What am I capable of doing. I work with some limited fine motor use of my hands caused by some severe injuries over the years. The reconstructions and re-attachments have allowed me to do some pretty cool things but working real small isn’t one of them. So I tend to design as simple statements. I use jigs. And with the exception of pin backs and ear nuts I make every component used in my jewelry. And over the years of crawling around shows I have found, early on, that I am not at all unique.

The second part of design basics would be learn to draw. With a pencil on paper. Draw the piece from all aspects just like in 10th grade drafting class. You may see the structural problems before they arise. Rob and I have both commented to each other over the years that we have pages of design sketches; the product of many staff meetings over the course of our working years.

The third basic to me is learn your materials and this would include using your tools I believe. How does metal move when heated. What is the process of sequential soldering? What do I polish and what do I leave in the rough.

My last design basic is this: Is the design safe to make and safe to wear.

Apologies if this sounded too much like a lecture. I think we all start at that basic level where by we heat and hit metal with hammers until we have something to be proud of.

My two cents.

Don Meixner

28

Yes I resent it.
---- Robert Meixner orchid@ganoksin.com wrote:

29

Sorry, but perhaps im thick, just dont follow what it is you resent?
Ive reread all posts and cant find it.
Ted.

30

Not thick Ted. There problem was on my end.
---- Edward Vladimir Frater orchid@ganoksin.com wrote: