Taking This Fine Jewelry–Making Class Taught Me More Than How to Paint a Diamond Necklace

Our teachers, a visual artist and a designer for Van Cleef & Arpels, would be lecturing us about gouache, which is a type of watercolor paint used to create highly intricate renderings of high jewelry for the craftspeople of a jewelry house to work off Outside of the initial process of choosing gemstones, the gouache is the very first step in the process of creating a one-of-a-kind piece of jewelry Gouache is still used today, only in the couture jewelry realm, and even as new technologies have been utilized in the workshops, these paintings remain true to their origins.

The process begins with a sketch of the brass mock-up from the designer, after which the artist shades in the drawing with a pencil and later, paints a separate sketch, mimicking the lines and shading of the first, with the gouache so that the jewelry appears in an almost 3-D form We started our class by studying gouaches of necklaces, rings, and brooches, some that were from Van Cleef & Arpels and others from houses like Cartier and Boucheron Currently, Van Cleef & Arpels has three in-house artists who specialize in gouache.

The table is the main facet of a stone and a jeweler in the workshop will know how to cut it based on the angles and clarity of the one featured in the gouache. . Source