Wednesday Workshop: Balancing Spikes and Spheres

Wednesday Workshops explore the designs of other jewelry artists, looking for inspiration and enlightenment about jewelry physics and design. The whole series can be found in chronological order here. Today's workshop keeps the focus on shape and examines balance in this Fred Leighton masterpiece. (This image came across my Pinterest feed as 'Diamond Stars and Fringe Necklace,' but sad to say the only one I can find on the website looks a little different.)

Margie Deeb's book on bead design has a whole chapter on shape and training yourself to look closely at the shapes that make up a piece of jewelry and the shape of the piece as a whole. This Leighton necklace takes two shapes that are fundamentally opposed and makes them dance together beautifully.

Spheres are soothing shapes, regular and perfect and predictable. They speak of comfort and completion. They're weighty shapes, solid and final as the punctuation at the end of a sentence. Spikes meanwhile are dangerous, sharp, irregular, alarming. But when those solid spheres come to rest on the points of those dangerous spikes, the effect is nothing short of celestial. The spheres seem to float, small planets in a sky full of stars (even without the star shapes hanging below). Longer and shorter spikes allow the lower curve of the necklace to expand into still more negative space, keeping the overall shape fluid, dynamic rather than static. The star shapes add a bit more danger back into the mix, even as their points call back to the spikes in the rest of the necklace, leading to a feeling of completion and deliberate structure. Every part of this necklace has something to say to every other part—and at the same time, the piece as a whole has an impact completely separate from the individual components.

Try this on:

• Instead of using two contrasting shapes, use two variants of one shape. For instance: long thin isosceles triangles versus short, stubby equilateral triangles.
• Add color. But where? Should the spheres be one hue and the spikes another contrasting color? Or should the necklace as a whole show a gradient? Perhaps light on the outside and brighter on the inside?
• Double the width of the band and make this a bold cuff bracelet. Something that creeps like ice up the wrist. Something a faerie queen might wear to dazzle the hearts of her enemies.

Wednesday Workshop: Coloring Outside the Lines

Being good at obeying the rules means it's easy for me to follow patterns online and from beading books, which has been a great boon as a mostly self-taught creator. I was never the kid who colored outside the lines: I was the kid who learned about shading and point pressure and cross-hatching, who was careful to keep each area of color separate from its neighbor. I liked the freedom to choose colors within the limits of that black-line shape. I liked having a structure to react against -- it was safer. Being limitless felt eerily like being out in space, adrift without a ship to anchor me. I liked the secure feeling of gravity tugging at me, even as I dreamt of flying. But rules, even laws, even the law of gravity -- sometimes they're made to be broken.

The repetitive rhythm and geometric architecture of beadweaving bears the risk of confining me to symmetry and rigidity. Old habits make me flounder a bit when asked to strike out on my own into the blue. It's profoundly helpful to see work like David Chatt's October Bracelet, which takes the regularity of cubic right-angle weave and explodes it into a symphony of chaos and visual surprise.

On the one hand: squares, right? Symmetrical squares, each side identical to every other, the most static shape in all the visual world. And cubic right-angle weave is a set of squares made of smaller squares -- it treats the beads as building blocks, and makes cube shapes out of round beads.

David Chatt has taken the most predictable shape in beadweaving and exploded it.

We have precisely one unity here: there's the individual cubic RAW unit, which has an echo in the large rectangular outline of the bracelet as a whole. That's it. Everything between those  -- color, balance, texture, rhythm -- appears improvised and haphazard. Oranges, purples, and a little bit of gold-green dance around one another, sans focal. Spiral shapes and waffled areas and little zigzagging hops of cubes resting on top. Some shapes are layered on top of one another, others intertwine, others nestle against one another like lovers. I could stare at this piece for weeks and not see every detail. It really is an astonishing piece of art, and a spur to get myself out of whatever rut I find myself in, design-wise.

Try this on:

• Diane Fitzgerald's geometric shapes: cylinder beads are basically pixels, and there's a lot of color possibilities within the framework of a rigid structure.
• Bead netting: netting is such a simple stitch, but simplicity here is the foundation for ambition.
• Pearls in a rainbow of sizes and colors: right-angle weave or sculptural peyote could make a frothy, feminine masterpiece.

Wednesday Workshop: Repeating Shapes, Varying Colors

Today's Wednesday Workshop features a pair of Emma Stine earrings found via Pinterest. This piece shows us a useful lesson about balancing repetition and variation in design.

Note how the earrings are made of identical shapes in three different colors: deep rose, pale rose, and white. The designer has put the highest contrast in the center by putting the bright white-and-metal marquise on top of the deep rose crystal marquise, making the center of the earring the focal point -- a strong design choice. The pale rose marquise frames the contrast and completes the color and shape story (we love the Rule of Three even in visual design). The round post mounts at the top echo the pattern (three colors, brightest in the middle with a pale rose frame) but don't compete with the power of the marquise shape.

Try this on:

• Peyote hexagons and round rings, much as I love building them, aren't going to work as well for this shape story: they leave too much space on either side, which will unbalance the design. Rectangles and ovals, though, could be used in similar ways. For instance, a quick pendant design sketch:
• Another idea would be to vary the order of the shapes -- put the bright white marquise in the center as a focal, flanked by several marquises of deep rose, and then straps of pale rose marquises to either side for a necklace or bracelet.

Wednesday Workshop: Pitting Color Against Shape

Nothing says "I'm a busy and responsible adult" like posting a Wednesday Workshop on a Thursday, right? Right. Today's inspiration comes from a Chanel necklace originally found on Russian Vogue, though the link appears to have gone bad. Instead, a screencap:

It is so easy, especially in beadwork where we're building components one tiny piece at a time, to believe that the colors we use have to correspond perfectly with the shapes we're building. This necklace blows that notion all to bits. The round components add one layer of symmetry, while the dark rectangles worked into the stones add a second, differently symmetrical layer. Tracing the various symmetries and asymmetries in this necklace is a full-time job.

The result is a great deal of movement for the eye, and a much more sophisticated and modern effect than a simple necklace of circular components. After staring at it for hours, slightly hypnotized, I also noticed that the round components are themselves irregular in size. This necklace is like a still of a party from a black-and-white film: a chaotic scene that happens to have been momentarily focused in time.

Try this on:

• Any necklace made of repeated shapes, like Maggie Meister's 'Olivia' necklace (a perennial personal favorite).
• Beaded rings of various sizes, carefully arranged -- would take some serious math-working, but would be stunning in effect.
• Bead embroidery: the necklace base takes one shape, and the pattern on top takes another, contrasting shape.
• Anything from Diane Fitzgerald's Shaped Beadwork could be given the same extra layer of contrast color very easily. I am tickled by the idea of a series of flat peyote hexagons in dark amber, with a bright gold or deep red line of beads wending haphazardly along the row.