Starting to design

I have started to work on a new jewellery design inspired by the photo of a cut-off tree branch shown in a previous post. These scans (left and below) from my sketchbook are my first attempts to follow the suggestions in Designing and Making Jewellery by Sarah Macrae about refining a shape by making repeated drawings. These would include for example a series of increasingly fatter versions, stretched versions etc.

I have found it hard to keep to only one kind of change in each drawing (e.g. just stretching without any changes in the relative sizes and shapes of the components), but it is proving to be a useful and informative exercise.

The larger image at the start of the post shows various modifications of the original drawing made using the computer. In this case it has been easier to perform just the one kind of geometrical operation at a time.

When I come back to this I shall select the elements I like best from the drawings so far and continue to refine the drawings.