Ideas to Help You Develop Your Unique Jewelry Making Style

When you market your handcrafted jewelry, a unique jewelry making style can be your best edge over the jewelry maker in the next booth. You may pride yourself in using the best quality materials and creating jewelry with meticulous precision. You may sell at the finest art shows and list on well traveled websites. You may do everything right, and still not be able to craft your own personal jewelry success story.

There are no guarantees when it comes to selling your handcrafted jewelry; but if you develop a style that's different from everyone else, you will be well on your way. Here are 5 tips to help you find your unique jewelry making style

1. Find Your Jewelry Making Thing

There are lots of jewelry making techniques. If you don't have a favorite, dabble in everything until you do. Take a wirework class. Practice beading, enameling or metalwork? Experiment with Precious Metal Clay. Figure out how to create jewelry with feathers. Eventually you will find your thing, the jewelry making technique you absolutely love to do.

2. Master the Skill

Now that you have a thing, practice, practice, practice! Buy the right equipment. Get the perfect materials. Study the way other jewelry artists use the technique you love. Work a little every day if you can, and you will become the best. Whatever your jewelry calling, learn to master the skill and you will be well on your way to success.

3. Do Your Jewelry Making Technique Your Way

Once you've found the technique that gets you excited, figure out new ways to use it. If it's wire, find a new twist. If you do metalwork, try fusing sterling silver to copper and copper to brass. Don't make just circles or ovals or squares, create your own shapes. Do things other jewelry artists don't do.

4. Find Your Jewelry Making Theme

Little Bo Peep has sheep. Harry Potter has Magic. Yogi Bear has picnic baskets. The most memorable personalities have themes you always remember. Your jewelry making theme can do the same for you, while giving you an ongoing body of ideas.

Use your theme to put your jewelry making on a distinctive path. If you love angels, make the best angel jewelry in town. If fantasy is your calling, make every piece of jewelry into a wearable fantasy. Create using your personal theme. Let people know what you're doing and why; and customers will come looking for you.

Read the article, Designing Handcrafted Jewelry Using a Theme for ideas on developing your own personal theme.

5. Keep a Jewelry Design Diary

If you keep an ongoing diary of jewelry making ideas, your creativity will soar. You may have already figured it out. Just because you sit down to create, it doesn't mean the ideas will come. In fact, the very instances when you're under pressure to create are when ideas are least likely to present themselves.

Ideas come when they will. Jewelry making inspiration strikes when you're driving down the street, eating dinner or even when you're fast asleep. Your job as a jewelry designer is to capture those ideas as they arrive and document them in your design diary. It doesn't have to be a fancy leather bound book, a simple spiral pad will do. It's simple. When a jewelry idea pops into your head do this:

-Write down your jewelry making design idea

-Draw a sketch.

-Add your thoughts on color and texture

Eventually you will have a whole book of ideas to call upon when it's time to create. Creative block won't stand a chance. Check out the article Your Jewelry Design Diary for more ideas.

Source:
My Personal Jewelry Design Theories and Ideas