Textural Trials — W H E R E A B O U T S | B.T.S
Inspiration
Looking at the newspaper laid down after an art experiment during the lockdown, I saw an Impasto type texture form from the leftover paints on my brother's palette who is an artist ( find him at @brohan_ ) and I was immediately drawn to it. With my penchant for wanting to turn everything into metal, I took a couple of pictures of the texture and sat to wonder on how I could play with this texture on my next collection. After a few exciting days of research, sketching and looking at impasto art we came up with our initial prototypes.
Initial Designs
Pictured above: A few of our initial sketches of the Vision Ring, New Dreams Medallion Necklace and the Wandering Crescent Moon Necklace.
We started to sketch and came up with the rugged New Dreams medallion necklace, Vision rings and our biggest crescent moon pendant yet, the Wandering Crescent Moon necklace.
CAD Designs
We turned the sketches into CAD designs to understand the texture and sizing of the pieces. During our CAD design phase, we have a lot of discussions on the size, thickness and length that would be ideal for our consumers and ask ourselves what changes can we make to make the design more wearable. This process takes about 2-3 weeks and then we finally get to our favourite part, the samples.
Sampling
When a sample is sent to us from Jaipur, everyone at the Lune studio is excited to see the design finally come to life.
First we look at the piece to check for the shape, size and the heaviness. We also do a little trial session, where one of us wears the piece for a week and then we have a feedback meeting, where we discuss if the piece was heavy, whether it was easy to style and if people around got curious to check out the piece. Sometimes, we even keep it at the store and check how customers react to it.
Our first sample of the New Dreams Medallion Necklace was this oval textured shaped medallion. We kept trying out different shapes, but we were ultimately drawn to the beautiful classic circle medallion that looked like an imperfect wax seal stamp.
Sample of the Vision cuff from the Karigar's studio.
Our teeny sample of our beloved Vision Hoop. We tried to make the pieces a lot lighter than the sample. Instead of a full hoop, we decided to do a half hoop, which is unique and feels good on the ear.
The process of sampling is slow, the Karigars melt each piece at different temperatures to get that perfectly imperfect Impasto-like texture. Each piece takes a day to be melted and moulded into the shapes we designed.
Final finishes
After adding our 18kt gold plating and silver rhodium plating we hang to air dry each piece.
For the Lune touch — we put the chains and the Lune tag on each piece by hand. Anyone who works at Lune from the design to content team, to the operations staff, we all call ourselves jewellery designers and all of us take turns to assemble the Lune tags on to necklaces, bracelets and anklets at some point.
Check out our final collection and campaign here. Hope you enjoyed this process post, so many feels of gratitude here.