It began as a simple idea — to create a piece of artwork for my Mom's birthday. I thought about what she might like. Something lovely, full of flourishes and charming details.I sat down one evening and sketched out the letter R inside the shape of an oval and surrounded it with some flourishes. It took several revisions to get it right, a lot of erasing and re-drawing to fit all of the details into it in a way that looked balanced. And from there… well, it evolved, to say the least!
I experimented with many different aspects of it, the borders, whether the letter should be flat or beveled… should there be extra detail inside of it, or keep it simple? And finally, how to present it to her. Obviously, I wasn’t just going to give her a sketch on paper, so what next? I took the final sketch and refined it, printed it out on a large sheet of paper, then took a piece of watercolor paper, set that on top of the printout, both of which were set on top of a light box so I could trace the sketch onto the watercolor paper, and set forth painting it with metallic inks and a tiny paintbrush. Then I had it framed and, voila! Happy birthday, Mom!
She loved it and I liked the design so much that I decided to keep experimenting with it. I uploaded the basic design (sans details) to Shapeways where they made a wax 3D print of it and sent it to a jewelry manufacturer who cast it in gold for me. Right in time for Mother’s Day!
I later visited the jewelry supply company Rio Grande in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where they showed me how to use an engraving machine and then created an engraving of the design as an example. Merry Christmas, Mom! Now you have three versions of your initial letter.
From there I decided to design an entire line of jewelry based off of this decorative letter R. I figured it’d be somewhat easy to do; I had the basic principles of the design concept already laid out, and so I just needed to put some time into it and all of the pieces would fall into place, right? Never have I been so wrong! I spent MONTHS working on each letter design, trying to figure out where to fit each flourish to make it look balanced and beautiful.
For the uppercase letters, I referenced my font Yana — it worked perfectly for this design!
But I also kept coming into conflict with this concept — if I keep the letter looking visible, it left me with few options for flourishes. When I tried that approach, keeping the flourishes from interfering too much with the letter, the flourishes looked small, frilly and frail compared to the bold letter placed in the middle. Also, the flourishes HAD to be touching the letter in order for it to work as a piece to have cut outs. You simply can’t have a floating letter in an oval, the laws of physics apply! It got me thinking a lot about whether or not it was okay to sacrifice some legibility for the sake of design. I thought of illuminated letters, surrounded by intricate details and how fascinating they are to look at, regardless of legibility and decided to move forward with the deluge of detail. And an interesting comment emerged from some of my friends who saw this design. They actually liked that the letter was somewhat obscured by the flourishes — in fact, they thought that was the best aspect of the design — at a glance, it looks like a florid design, but look closer, and you'll see there's a letter in there.
I hope you all love this design series as much as I do. It’s intricate, interesting and has the appearance of a monogram: regal, romantic and fascinating to look at.
