Designing a Summery, Pinwheel Ring
This is a fun, and summary ring design. I wanted to do something unusual and with a fun personality. As I was turning out the lights to go to sleep, this idea hit me. I was a bit mad because it had gotten late and I just wanted to shut my eyes, but I felt like I needed to get this idea jotted down roughly before calling it a day. Of course, once I started drawing, I began to really enjoy myself and lose track of time, making it that much later. LOL. Oh well. What do you do? I had a good time and slept well after drawing for a while.
The design is inspired by the classic pinwheel toy, but also a bit by the beautiful flowing shapes of seashells. I recently made a CAD model for client who designed a pendant to look like a seashell. That design, and seashells in general, have such beautiful shapes to them, that there is definitely some inspiration from that in the propellers.
I also shaped the band of the ring to echo the propeller shape, using a swooped shape with a vanishing edge.
How I’ll produce this, well, I have no idea. But I’m sure where there is a will there is a way. I want to make it out of separate pieces so the propellers spin freely, making it a fun, fidget spinner to wear on a warm summer day. I’ll have to start chatting up some metal smiths to figure this out. In order to highlight the spinning fun of the ring it is a two tone ring, using yellow gold for the propellers, and white gold for the band and bezel. I chose a blue sapphire because it will really pop with that yellow propeller.
And of course, as I usually do, when I woke the next morning I decided it is too mundane and done. Well I didn’t know this for sure, but it seemed to me that I couldn’t be the 1st person to think of making a spinning pinwheel ring. And sure enough, with some Googling, I found other examples people had made. None of them looked like mine, but I still feel there is room to give it more personality and really make it stand out from the crowd and pop. I plan to sit down and do another drawing to develop this idea further by making a spinning flower. I want to capture the beauty of the textures and asymmetry of nature. I want to capture some of the down home feel of flowers from back home in the south.
Honestly, I’m not sure how I’m going to do that either. In the past I would have made a beautiful drawing and handed it off to a wax carver, because shapes with this level of organic complexity are very difficult to build computer models of, but I think I’m going to try it. I want something that will be easy to reproduce, and that is one of the strengths of computer models. I’m going to dig into digital sculpting and see where that takes me. While I’m a whiz at working curves, surfaces and control points to replicate elegant shapes from drawings, digital sculpting, or sculpting at all, will be a new challenge for me, but I look forward to it.
Enjoy the design and let me know your thoughts in the comments. Is this something you’d wear? If you were developing it further, what changes would you make? And speaking of fun summery stuff, what’s your favorite part of summer?
I’m Alex, from Charming Quail Jewelry Design, where we make jewelry CAD models for jewelry companies, as well as fun side projects. To hear more about those fun side projects, sign up for our email list.