Designing The Sun Sign

One of my blog “followers” asked about the design process at JH Breakell and suggested I write a little about it. Well, sometimes its truly inspired and sometimes its more pedestrian. What follows is fairly typical of our “process”.

About twice a year we work on new pieces, usually coinciding with the publication of new catalogs Which season we’re designing for i.e. Fall/Winter or Spring/Summer, and then start thinking about what we would like to offer our customers. Last spring we wanted something unequivocally “summer” so I started working on a sun image.



It started with a bunch of rough pencil sketches, they evolved into more detailed sketches and then that design was put to metal, either by cutting and fabricating or carving wax and casting. Finally the finished, original design is molded for production and our “run” of the design in either Sterling Silver or 14 karat gold, but very often both.

Last year’s “Sun Sign” pendant, earrings and pin are a good example of this process. It started with a vision of a slightly psychedelic version of a summer sun and evolved through a series of sketches to the design you see on our website. Sun Sign Pendant Eventually we made earrings, a charm and a pin using the same theme.

This is admittedly a very brief explanatioin, but it is typical of the steps we go through in creating new pieces of jewelry. We also draw a lot of inspiration from ideas our customers suggest. What would you like to see? We would love to hear from you. Leave us your idea in a comment.

Lost in Negative Space

In metal smithing we call designs with open areas cut into a pattern “piercing”. It usually involves careful thought, a lot of tricky cutting with a jeweler’s saw and much patience. I always loved piercing. I enjoyed the methodical process of drilling, setting the blade and the way the metal pieces fall away as you cut and the pattern emerges in the silver. But I always had a hell of a time figuring out the design because I had to think in terms of “negative space”. In other words the design was developed by thinking about what wasn’t there as opposed to what was there.

This serving set (A), which I made many years ago, is a good example of the process. Piercing, like most decorative steps, is done near the end of the project. I made the serving set almost completely before I set about to pierce out the spoon’s bowl. Piercing before forming the bowl and fabricating the handle socket and ebony handle could have resulted in the bowl shape becoming deformed as it is hammered into shape.

So the pattern for the piercing had to be carefully planned and laid out prior to any cutting. Failure to plan properly could result in days of labor creating the serving set being wasted if the pierced pattern, cut into the finished piece, wound up uneven or distorted because of poor planning. I spent a lot time sketching possible patterns. Here are a few sketches (B) I found in my design book from the 1970’s. You can see that I did not use this exact pattern for my final piercing but this will give you an idea of how the design is derived on paper before cutting begins.

Another reason for not piercing a piece before it is nearly complete is that the work always takes on a shape and character which may not have been planned for so the silversmith must be sure that the decoration chosen is in harmony with the final shape and proportion of the finished piece.

One Thing Leads To Another

Looking for work in Newport in 1972 led to…
a job polishing in a silver plating shop which led to…
learning how to repair silver hollowware which led to…
gaining a love of the craft which led to…
a decision to make the craft my life which led to…
learning lost wax casting which led to…
a low cost way to make my designs which led to…
creating a line of jewelry and buckles which led to…
selling them to stores which led to…
selling and designing for Cartier in NYC which led to…
meeting the owner of Trafalgar Ltd which led to…
a salaried job designing for Trafalgar which led to…
enough money to buy a new house which led to…
a new workshop which led to…
a mail order business in the house which led to…
successful ads in New Yorker which led to…
growing demand for our designs which led to…
an bigger workshop out of the house which led to…
a full time staff and a retail store in Newport, RI.

More to come. What's next?

So You Want To be An Artist (Part 2)

When I reached my early 30’s I began realize that I could not keep up the pace of my first years as a metal smith and I needed to come up with a plan to end the cycle of boom and bust. Boom when I finally sold a piece of silverware and bust during the long intervals between sales. Lets face it, being a "starving artist" is OK for only so long…pretty soon it gets to be a bit of a bore. I believe that almost all artists hit this realization at some point, but continuing the essence of their creative drive while securing stable income is quite a trick.

Actually it isn’t a trick at all; it is an absolute necessity and necessity is the mother of invention..

So You want To Be an Artist (Part 3)

One of the few things I had made, almost from the beginning, that were regular sellers, were hand made belt buckles. Most were made using a decorative technique called “repoussee” which creates a relief design on the surface of the silver using punches and small chisels called “tracers”. One sees this kind of decoration on old tea pots and bowls. I used it to create one of kind buckles featuring whales, sailing ships and other somewhat more whimsical designs.

Customers could have a one of a kind buckle made using a design which I drew for them and featured any animal or theme they wanted. These buckles could take as long as 3-4 days to complete and I usually sold them for around $100. Ha! At that price one can see why they were good sellers.

It wasn't long before I learned about rubber molding and lost wax casting. This was a process where I could make inexpensive copies of some of my most popular buckle designs and offer them for a lot less money than the "one off" versions. I started with half a dozen buckles and with the rubber modls could make copies which I offered in brass and sterling silver. At the time I was working out of a shop on the waterfront in Newport and the season for tourists was pretty short. I had to figure out a way to sell more buckles all the year around

Enter Joe Kadison, an independant sales represetative who carried a line of clothing, nautical gear and accessories and sold them to stores all over the eastern seaborad. He loved my buckles and he convinced me that he could sell them to some of his accounts. I agreed to give it a try and before long I found myself selling to stores from Maryland to Maine.>

So You want to be an Artist (Part 1)

The Artist As A Young Man.

In 1972, when I started working in silver, I tried to make all of my designs one of a kind works of art; masterpieces of the silversmith's craft. I carefully honed my skills, expanded my repertoire and more or less went on a metal smithing binge; working 50, 60 hours a week in my workshop. I was trying everything. Spoons, boxes, wine goblets, belt buckles, plates, trays and eventually a tea service. There didn't seem to be anything I couldn't do if I set my mind to it. I was 24. I I was single. t was Newport. It was GREAT!

But after several years of this creative blitz, I came to the realization that I might go broke trying to sell my "one of a kinds". Frankly, few people wanted to spend thousands, much less hundreds of dollars on handmade silverware (my first love). I wanted it to be the 18th century, when one's personal wealth was measured by the value of his "plate" or silverware not by their "life style". But when my 30's loomed I started to reconfigure my life plan.....and my creative parameters.

Surprising Designs Part Two

There are a lot of designs we create which fail utterly to ring anyone's bell. A good example of this was the replica pin of a 1953 Buick Roadmaster grill. This was to be the kick-off piece in a whole series of jewelry designs based on the golden age of US automobile manufacturing. Remember them? They were made in a place called "Detroit" and some of the bumper and grill designs were reallly sculpture in an industrial arts kind of way. At anyrate, I had envisioned a whole series of replica jewelry from this "golden age".

But it certainly didn't inspire our customers. I think we sold about a dozen over the course of a year and finally retired the piece. In all truth the piece was too heavy and too large to worn comfortably. I remember Joan (my wife and business partner) wearing the pin out to lunch one day and our waitress asked if it was one of those "old fashioned radios" Well, kind of. I had hoped that "art" would carry the day, but like my friend Jeff Deegan used to say "Art is Long, Life is Short".

There it is.