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Jewellery design course

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Designing and getting ideas
This week I attended a one day jewellery design course at the London Jewellery School. The tutor was Michael Milloy who has a lot of experience in jewellery design for catwalk and boutiques. 
I have attended a lot of classes in technique but I am interested in taking it a step further (or taking a step back) and looking at how to generate ideas and designs. This course was perfect for that. There were only six students which meant that we could discuss our ideas and develop our designs with Michael as the day progressed. 
I decided to work on the Art Clay Guild competition theme 'Fantasy, myth and magic'. We had a lot of books and magazines to get ideas from and I was soon sketching things out and discussing them with Michael. I think it would be difficult to achieve on this course without a specific idea or theme to develop.
I really gained a lot and I will be making up my design in my week off in August. I am very pleased with the way it progressed and learnt a lot about Michael's design process. It is a bit of a chicken and egg thing. Do you learn design first and then learn how to make? Or do you learn how to make and then get into design? I think you do need to have a little experience with the materials in order to generate ideas. I certainly felt that my experience with metal clay, enamel and beading helped me visualise what I want to make. 
I'll post a picture when the competition has closed.
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Comments

  1. Tania Covo20 July 2011 at 08:58

    Thanks for the post, I was considering taking this course. Now I think I will :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anna23 July 2011 at 11:40

    Hi Tania. I really do recommend the course but I think you get most out of it when you have a basic idea you want to achieve. Let me know how you got on!

    ReplyDelete

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