Hand vs Computer

by Heather Mourer February 22, 2019

My high school English teacher, Mrs Griggs, always told us that she could tell if we first wrote our papers by hand before we typed them out. She said the papers that were first handwritten had so much more depth and quality of thought than the ones that were purely typed out. According to Forbes magazine, using a pencil or pen over a typewriter or computer increases neural activity similar to meditating! Read article here

This is true for design as well. (See original sketch above from new collection coming soon!) When I'm designing by hand, I trace the actual stone(s) I'll be using, in this case a rose cut rutilated tourmaline stone, and start "playing" around it with my pencil. I tried radiating the structure outside of the stone rather than beneath it, inspired by the exterior arched supports of the flying buttresses of Notre Dame. The next step could be to put the design into CAD (computer aided design) which I'm trained in, but we just head straight into hand fabrication, making every step of our process from design though creation, purely handmade.