Improve Your Hand Shaping Ability

Hand shaping is one of the most important skills for a gemcutter. Being able to look at a unique piece of rough and seeing the hidden shape inside of it and then actually creating that shape with only your eye and hand is a powerful ability.

This course walks you through the process of seeing and executing shapes by hand over the course of an hour and four different exercises. These exercises are essential for anyone wanting to be able to master hand shaping, whether for maximizing yield in rough or for improving a bad stone to a great stone in recutting. Hand shaping is necessary for all types of advanced and professional faceting.

Connect You Hands and Eyes

Throughout this course, we will offer tips and tricks to be able to do the fine shaping of a stone. As always, we will use sharp, close up videos to show you exactly what we are doing at each step so that you can clearly understand what you should be seeing and what your hands should be doing.

At the end of this course, you will have a solid idea of how to shape the stone by hand, how to get balanced and symmetrical shapes, and how to use the light to help you. All that's left to do after this is practice, practice, practice.

What You Will Learn

  • 1

    Hand Preforming - 1 Hour

    • Introduction

    • Hand Preforming a Round

    • Hand Preforming an Oval

    • Hand Preforming a Pear

    • Hand Preforming a Cushion

    • Conclusion

Hand Preforming is part of the
Faceting Fundamentals course group

This first block of four courses teaches you all the essential skills you need to competently facet a stone: Understanding all the aspects of the handpiece machine, understanding how to manipulate the geometry of facets through the handpiece plate and cheater, polishing theory, wax dopping, glue transfers, and much more. These four courses and the designs that are cut in them serve as the foundation upon which the rest of the courses are built.

  • Faceting Foundations 1

    Discover all the essential information you need to get started as a gemcutter before beginning your first cutting project: the round brilliant.

  • Faceting Foundations 2

    Begin your second cutting project, the square step cut, while also learning more advanced foundational cutting techniques.

  • Hand Preforming

    Learn the traditional techniques for making the perfect hand-shaped outlines to prepare yourself for ovals, cushions, and fancy shapes.

  • Mastering the Mixed Cut

    Add to the techniques you've already learned during your next two projects, the oval and cushion mixed cuts, and complete your foundational training.

What You Will Need

The Faceting Apprentice courses require that you have a basic home faceting studio in order to follow along with the courses

  • A Faceting Machine; Handpiece or Mast-type

  • All the necessary tools for wax dopping, glue transfers, cutting and polishing laps, and more.

  • See our Studio Setup Guide video for a complete walkthrough on what you need.