DIMENSIONALITY: One Principle of Composition

Jewelry Design is the application of basic principles of artistic expression. One set of principles involves COMPOSITION, CONSTRUCTION and MANIPULATION. In an article online —Jewelry Design Principles — , I define what types of goals the good jewelry designer should achieve. Discussion on these principles and their application focus on what elements in our pieces we , as jewelry designers, manipulate in order to achieve a principled, satisfactory outcome.

In this post, I focus on one in particular: Dimensionality.

QUESTION:
What kinds of things have you manipulated within your piece(s) that helps you achieve a satisfying sense of dimensionality?

Conversely, where do you see failures in attempts to achieve “dimensionality”, and what kinds of wrong-way choices do you think the jewelry designer made, that might have led to this failure? What better choices could the designer have made?

Dimensionality

Good Dimensionality refers to the degree to which, whether the piece is flat or 3-dimensional, the placement of objects (and their attributes) is satisfying, and does not compete or conflict with the dimensionality of the piece as a whole.

Sometimes dimensionality is achieved through the positioning of masses of objects or planes of interconnected pieces, such as varying sizes/heights/lengths or layering or cut-aways, or varying positive and negative spaces.