Sketch to Piece

Every piece in the Joryel Vera collection starts the same way: as a drawing, not a CAD file.

Joryel has been designing sterling silver jewelry since 1987. Before a single piece of metal is cut, a design begins as a hand sketch — proportions worked out on paper, the way they've always been worked out, long before 3D modeling software existed and still the way he prefers to work now. That's not nostalgia for its own sake. Hand drawing forces a different kind of thinking than a screen does: you're working out how light will move across a curve, how a stone will sit against the metal around it, before either exists.

From sketch to master. Once a design is settled on paper, it's translated into a physical master — the template every production piece is built from. This is where the sketch's proportions get tested against reality: does the bezel actually hold the stone at this angle, does the band sit comfortably at this thickness, does the earring hang the way the drawing implied it would. Adjustments happen here, not after production starts.

Stone selection happens early, not last. The gemstones used across the collection — amethyst, blue topaz, garnet, iolite, peridot, and others — are chosen for color at the rough stage, before cutting. That's a deliberate order of operations: color is graded first because color is what most affects how a stone reads in a finished piece, more than clarity specifications most buyers never check anyway. The stones are then brilliant-faceted in rounds, cut to let light pass through rather than reflect off a flat, closed back.

The setting is still cut by hand. This is the part that surprises people: in an industry that's moved heavily toward CAD-and-cast production, a meaningful amount of the work on each master is still done by hand in sterling — not modeled and printed. It's slower. It's also why the details hold up under a loupe instead of just from three feet away: backs finished as carefully as fronts, bezels that sit flush instead of just close.

Then, the finish. A micron of rhodium plating goes over the finished sterling — not to hide the metal underneath, but to give it a tarnish-resistant, bright white surface with the tone of white gold, without the price of white gold. It's a genuine plating layer over solid sterling silver, which is worth understanding on its own terms; we've written about the difference between that and silver-plated base metal if you want to go deeper.

The result of this whole chain — sketch, master, stone, hand-set, finish — is jewelry that was designed by one person with a specific point of view, not generated from a catalog of interchangeable settings. Browse the collection →