How to Draw a Moissanite ring

I am not a fine artist and depend very less on illustrations  when it comes to jewellery. However, Since I do teach a course on Precious jewellery, I find it important to demonstrate atleast basic gemstone renderings and jewellery illustrations. This post on how to Draw a Moissanite ring stems from one such class demo.

In my personal experience I find, diamonds and ruby difficult to render. However, Moissanite is even harder as it is super shiny – shinier than a diamond. So there are several things to be kept in mind, primarily the use of black which needs to be limited.

Materials to draw a Moissanite ring

Since this was a class demo, I used limited materials. To try it out, you will require

• A brown card sheet as a base
• white and black poster colour paints
• HB pencil, Black colour pencil ( I used both Staedtler and Prisma colours)
• White glass marker
• Round brush and square brush

How to Draw a Moissanite ring

I started by drawing the outline of a ring using HB pencil. I used the photograph of the ring from my Learn everything about moissanite post as my initial reference though I modified it as I went by. To make my process easier, I mixed different grays – 20% gray, 40% gray, 60% gray and used three different brushes dipped in them to simultaneously colour. Let the layers dry.

I added white in layers using both white paint and colour pencil. Reserve pure white only double refraction areas which is common in a moissanite. The trick is to be light handed with black as blackness is a diamond like stone is extinction and makes the stone undesirable. As the metal used in the ring is platinum, I used light gray instead of white.

I won’t lie, but this illustration took a lot of time. Maybe because I drew a large ring, I don’t know but the double refraction does take a long time to finish. However, I discovered a trick to render diamonds quickly in the process, which is to use HB pencil instead of black to get shiny grays.

I was away from this blog for a while first due to my work with the Jewelry in Narratives exhibition and I was really sick. Hopefully, from now on, I will get back to blogging like before.

I hope you find it interesting