Most jewelry designers start with a sketch, a piece of wire, or a sheet of metal. I start with a blank viewport in ZBrush. That choice shapes everything about what Ian's Objects is — how the pieces look, what forms are possible, and why the work doesn't look like anything else in independent jewelry.
What ZBrush Actually Is
ZBrush is a digital sculpting program. It was built for the film and video game industries — character artists use it to model creatures, faces, anatomy, anything organic. The tool treats a 3D model like digital clay: you push, pull, smooth, carve, and build up forms with a stylus on a tablet, the same way you'd work with physical material. Except there's no gravity, no drying time, and no limit on how fine the detail can go.
It's not a typical jewelry design tool. Most digital jewelry design happens in CAD programs like Rhino or Matrix — software built for precision engineering, where you define shapes with measurements and mathematical curves. That approach is great for geometric designs, bezels, and prong settings. It's not great for sculpting a skull.
Why Organic Forms Need a Different Tool
The work I'm drawn to is sculptural. Anatomy, expression, texture, forms that flow and connect organically. Trying to build a screaming face in a CAD program would mean defining every curve mathematically — plotting control points, adjusting splines, working in a way that fights the organic nature of what you're trying to make.
ZBrush doesn't work that way. You sculpt intuitively. You build up a brow ridge by dragging a brush across the surface. You hollow out an eye socket by pressing in. The jaw tension on the bypass ring's screaming faces came from the same gestures you'd use if you were sculpting in clay — except the resolution is millions of polygons, and you can undo anything.
That difference in process creates a difference in outcome. The skull band's six faces flow into each other because I sculpted the transitions by feel, not by calculating tangent angles. The bypass ring's open form wraps organically because I shaped it the way metal actually moves when it's molten — not the way a blueprint says it should.
What Digital Sculpting Unlocks
There are forms in my work that couldn't exist without this process. Specifically:
Undercuts and interior detail. The recessed areas between the skulls on the band ring — the shadow lines, the depth between each face — would be extremely difficult to achieve by hand fabrication. You'd need to file and carve into solid metal with tools that can't reach certain angles. In ZBrush, those areas are sculpted freely and then reproduced exactly through casting.
Anatomical accuracy at ring scale. A skull is about 8 inches tall. The skulls on my ring are roughly 8 millimeters. Getting anatomy to read correctly at that scale — brow structure, jaw proportions, cranial shape — requires a level of control that's nearly impossible with hand tools. In ZBrush, I sculpt at a scale where I can see every surface detail, then the 3D print reproduces it precisely.
Iteration without material cost. I went through dozens of versions of the skull band before the design was right. Each version was a matter of hours, not days of metalwork. The spacing between skulls, the width of the band, the depth of the carving — all of that was refined digitally before any metal was involved. In traditional fabrication, each iteration costs material and time. In ZBrush, it costs time only.
The Tradeoff: What Gets Lost
Digital sculpting isn't better than hand fabrication in every way. There's something about a piece that was filed, forged, and soldered by hand that carries the evidence of its making. Tool marks, slight asymmetries, the warmth of a surface that was shaped by physical contact with a maker's hands — those qualities are real and they matter.
My work doesn't have that. What it has instead is a level of sculptural complexity and anatomical detail that would take weeks or months to achieve by hand, if it were possible at all. It's a different set of values: precision of form over evidence of hand. Both are valid. I chose the one that lets me make the things I see in my head.
Where It Goes from Here
ZBrush is the starting point, but it's not the whole process. Every digital model still becomes a physical ring through lost wax casting — a process that's been around for thousands of years. The digital file becomes a wax print, the wax becomes a mold, the mold gets filled with molten sterling silver. The technology changed what goes into the mold. The casting process itself is ancient.
That combination — new tools feeding into old methods — is what defines Ian's Objects. It's not about being high-tech for its own sake. It's about using the tools that let me make the things I want to make, and then bringing them into the physical world through a process that's proven.
I'm working on new designs now. They're still starting in ZBrush. They're still going to end up in silver. What's changing is the complexity of what I'm willing to attempt — because every piece I finish teaches me more about where the line is between what works on screen and what survives in metal.
Want to see the design process in real time? Follow @iansobjects on Instagram for ZBrush turntables, screen recordings, and behind-the-scenes content. Or browse the current collection.