Class doesn't start for another 15 minutes, but students are already hurrying into room 201. They speak in hushed voices as they sharpen their pencils and pull vellum paper and grey cardboard out of their red plastic toolboxes.

Three days into the Jewelry Design course, they are eager to learn how to create the illusion of flat pieces of white gold and platinum in their renderings. Instructor Christopher Keenan passes out a sheet of paper with different shapes on it, including circles, squares and hexagons, and asks the students to trace them onto their vellum.

"To create white metal you have to use what we call 'highlight' - a white pencil or paint to show where the light would reflect off of a piece of jewelry," he explains. "To convey a flat surface, you need to highlight perpendicular to the light source and it should fade out by the half-way point. Be careful, if you want to suggest flat metal, your stroke needs to be straight and you have to keep it light."

The technique is a fundamental tool for a career in the design business. It's one of many essential aspects students will learn during GIA's eight-week course.

"It's really challenging and a ton of work, but you need to know these techniques to be a jewelry designer," says Liora Berdugo, who plans to return to her family's retail business in Canada after completing the course. "I love it and I can't wait to make my own amazing designs."

The course, which can be taken alone or as part of the Institute's Applied Jewelry Arts (A.J.A.) diploma program, is divided into two parts. Students learn the fundamental drawing and rendering techniques needed to create conventional jewelry materials in Unit I and then apply those skills to their designs in Unit II. Students learn how to draw faceted stones, shade them and render a number of cabochons, both opaque and translucent, in the first week alone.

"The beginning assignments have been really hard for me, but I'm learning a lot because I didn't have any experience before coming here," says Hsiang-Lin Lee.

Advanced Lessons Bring Designs to Life

The class moves into the second phase a few weeks later. They've traded their colored pencils for watercolor paints and their designs have started to take on a three-dimensional look as they put gemstones and metal together for the first time.

"I think the Jewelry Design course is the most exciting class GIA offers as it's the only one that really encourages your individual creativity," says Mark Maxwell, a GIA Jewelry Manufacturing Arts instructor and bench jeweler who is taking the course to become a design instructor. "It teaches people, in eight weeks, to take whatever is in their imagination and put it on paper."

Maxwell wraps a piece of tissue paper around his index finger before he adds highlight to the rubies on a yellow gold ring he's rendered. Back and forth he dips his brush in white paint, then in a little water, before rubbing some of it off on the tissue around his finger and softly applying it to the rendering. It is the best way he's learned to make gems sparkle, he says.

A few rows away, Priyanka Goel sits at her station working on a hinged bracelet with a box clasp. She pulls out a clear plastic, triangular-shaped drafting template with a straight edge and begins to draw tiny boxes on a piece of paper. Sketching out the design is the first step in creating one, she says.

"Now we're really designing jewelry," Goel says. "Yesterday we did a pearl set and today we're working on a bracelet. It's very interesting to learn how to paint all these things and now they're getting more complex."

Goel painted a little in college and is excited by the challenge of working on more intricate designs. Most of her classmates, however, haven't picked up a paint brush in years, if ever. Design instructor Robert Ackermann estimates that a fraction of students who take the course have an arts background.

"When a student enters the classroom they do not know how talented they are or aren't," he says. "Regardless of how evolved a student's ability is when they join the course, given the necessary motivation and dedication, all of them are able to realistically portray a variety of materials and show off a most impressive display of their work by the end of the program."

Design Skills Build Recognition

Many students have gone on to win prestigious industry awards using the techniques they learned in GIA's Jewelry Design course. Marisa Goebel La Belle, owner of Atelier Marisa in Santa Monica, California, took home a 2005 American Gem Trade Association Spectrum Award for a set of cultured Tahitian pearl and diamond earrings she designed. La Belle, who graduated from GIA in 1979, says the guidance she received helped her create the winning piece.

"Sue Adams was my design instructor at GIA," she says. "She was a really good teacher who helped me a lot and her words have always stuck with me, reverberating in my mind while I'm designing."

Susan Heard, A.J.A., won first runner-up in the Le Vian for Children competition, whose proceeds benefited the Jewelers For Children charity. Her domed ring of diamonds, rubies and sapphires was also unveiled during Le Vian's celebrity fashion show in Las Vegas in June.

"I came to GIA because I wanted to be able to manufacture a better product," says Heard, a 2005 graduate who owns a hand-made jewelry business in Colorado. "I didn't plan on entering a design competition, but I'm glad I did. Winning this award has shown me that I can accomplish anything."

Not everyone who takes the Jewelry Design course plans on pursuing a career as a designer. Many of Ackermann's students are being groomed to take over their family business, he says. Others may look for a job where they can learn more about gems, jewelry manufacturing, fashion and business soon after graduation.

But the techniques they learn to create life-like designs with their paint brushes and pencils help make them well-rounded professionals in any jewelry-related field they decide to follow.

"There is no doubt that a skilled tradesperson will be more valuable. The whole is almost always more valuable than the sum of the parts," Ackermann says. "But even if a student never designs again, they will certainly make more sensitive and discerning decisions in regards to product development and choice of inventory because they accomplished the fundamental design elements in this course."