David Klass Contest Solitaire Setting

I have been asked to post an entry of my design process. I wish I could post my thought process, but that’s just about impossible, seeing as how it took roughly 3 weeks to come up with the idea. The sketches themselves were a product of about 13 hours of just sitting and drawing. That doesn’t include the hours I spent looking to various things on the computer for inspiration (flowers, plants, other jewelry, art, fashion, etc) This post is going to be picture intensive and really long because there are a lot of pictures, so I’ll keep the words to a minimum. This is a ring design I did for another one of David Klass’s design contests.

The stone should look familiar, it was from this post: Purple Sapphire

Initial sketches just trying to get an idea of where I wanted to go. These are of the final idea, I played with a few other ideas before settling on this one, but I’m not including those.

Here we go with the official, real sketch begins, and yes, I’m walking you through it from the very beginning and going step by step. I really hate drawing ovals so I did that first. Rounds, cool. Squares, cool. Cushions are terrible. Ovals are worse.

I had to give my phone a charging break. It was at this point in the process where I stopped working on the profile because I didn’t know what design I wanted to go with.

Hah! Yes, I used colored pencils for this round, because that’s what I had to work with. I’ll graduate to something less preschool appropriate at some point.

I actually regret coloring it in because it looked so pretty before coloring it, but I think I got the color of it ok. It’s really difficult to try to capture the color of a stone that shifts color.

The profile was the last thing I drew, in the evening hours before the contest deadline. I had a hard time making a decision, based on something that would flow with the rest of the design and echo the elements on the shoulders.

So, I found out that you should look for a follow up to this post, because it was revealed that I won the design contest!

In other fantastic news, I will be doing a feature on Grace of Jewels by Grace in the not-too-distant future, so be on the look out for that