I say that A LOT! My Etsy Favorites is loaded with things I have my eyes on. A while back I did a Mustard & Gold Monday Mash Up (it still remains one of my favorites...) and I featured this pretty Ring by Doron of D.M. Designs:
This ring is just so interesting & super pretty!! Doron was nice enough to send me one & I LOVE it! It is so unique & elegant! I feel dainty & pretty when I wear it!
Getting to know fellow designers, learning more about them on a personal level & learning more about how they create is one of my favorite things in this handmade community!
Not only are we going to see some other amazingly unique pieces from Doron's shop, but we are lucky to get to take a peek inside Doron's studio in....ISRAEL!
My home studio is where all my designs are created, previously I was painting and sculpting but today, jewelry designing takes all of my time and so all my brushes and chisels have found their way to the attic.
- Walk us through an ordinary Work Day: An ordinary day of work starts by walking my beloved dog Zoey while drinking my morning coffee, then I get to read and answer all the emails that I received during the night (there is a 7 hours difference between Israel and USA which is where most of my customers come from).
Then work begins. I start working on all recent orders, welding, carving and designing what was sold on etsy. ebay or one of the stores that I sell through.
I go to visit the casting workshop to drop the recent wax models I have created to be cast in silver or gold and collect what was done I then go to visit the lab that does all the plating work for the gold plated jewelry I make.
After all this is done I get to do some designing. Testing new compositions in my sketchbook and working on the next design.
This goes on basically untill my girlfriend comes home from the architects office she works in, otherwise I would go on until my vision goes blurry :)
What inspires you? I am inspired by different things - Architectural concepts and compositions that I learned to love when I was studying architecture, classic and modern art like the clothing on renaissance sculptures which inspired my Golden Rag Series that imitates textile in metal just as the sculptors of Rome imitated it with marble.
But most of all I am inspired by nature. I believe nature holds the key to beauty and I am not the only one. Countless researches discovered it (the golden cut etc.) and so I use principals and composition I find in nature in different scales.
Sometimes in macro like my "Dunes" ring that shows a composition inspired by desert dunes and sometimes I zoom in to create the Bio Series that shows a composition that reminds of micro organisms or the natural flow of lava.
What is your favorite piece in your shop? It is difficult to talk about a favorite design, after all they are all exactly my taste :)
Nevertheless I think the designs the evolve into a collection like my Bio Series, Parched Earth Series and Golden Rag series are the ones I enjoyed most of all and wanted to create more variations of them.
How do you balance your work & personal life? It was difficult to balance my personal life with my work, especially since I enjoy it so much it is also my hobby and so if I have some free time I go to work :)
After a difficult first few month me and my partner decided that since I am a very demanding boss to myself I should set a rule about working hours.
My working day starts when I wake up and ends when my partner gets home, after that I am not allowed to work anymore.
The only thing I still do after hours is answer emails since I try to maintain a response time as short as possible but for that I have my Iphone that I can use for emails while I am out of my studio.
What is the best part of owning your own creative business?- The best part of owning your own business is that working hard pays off.
This is also the down side :)
Because I enjoy my work so much the harder I work the better I feel. Before I was designing jewelry for a living I would use many of my free days to sculpt, paint or design jewelry, now I get paid for it.
Outside the studio -
New or Old? New, repeating what was already done could be nice but creating something new is much more exciting.
Call or Text? Call, if its longer than a single sentence texting is to exhausting.
Small town or Big City? Big city, maybe because I was born in a small town I love big cities, the streets are full of people and exciting stuff happens everywhere you look. Also, the option of going somewhere where nobody knows you is fun and allows you to act freely.
Silver or Gold? Gold, definitely gold. If it looks better in silver use white gold, silver is only good when the budget dictates it.
Thanks for sharing your work Doron!
Be sure to go check out his beautiful jewelry & say Hi!
