The Art of Jewelry Design: Principles of Design, Rings and Earrings

Rating:
Summary: Great for Artists, not so great for jewelers
Review: The good: This book has absolutely drop dead gorgeous illustrations of fine jewelry created using precious metals and precious stones.

The bad: The book is targeted primarily to those who have excellent drafting or drawing skills, with very little to no instruction provided in developing the skills needed to execute the concepts in the book.

The "artistic values" are presented as matter of fact axioms, with no support or explanation. In other words, this is not a "how to do it" book at all. It's a lovely presentation of jewelry design illustration, but there is no teaching here, and no hints on how the illustrations might be actually rendered in metal and stone.

Nice "idea book" for manufacturing fine jewelers who render metal from drawings, but of little to no value for small scale artist jewelers with no drawing skills who render pieces via improvisitory skills and spontaneous arrangement of physical objects.