Domino Artist Builds Mesmerizing Structures
By Hannah Stevens @Hannahshewans
Scroll down for the full story
Videographer / director: Lily Hevesh
Producer: Hannah Stevens, Ruby Coote
Editor: Marcus Cooper
Artist Lily Hevesh, 18, first started working with dominos aged 10 and now her YouTube channel Hevesh5, which publishes stunning videos of her domino structures, is nearing 1 million subscribers.
Her immense structures can take anywhere from eight hours to a few days, with some pieces taking even longer - Hevesh’s glow in the dark domino creation was built over the space of a month.
The New Hampshire-based artist said: “When I was about 10-years old I found a pack of about 28 dominoes at my grandparents and, just bored, I decided to set them up and knock it down.
“I thought it was really cool watching them fall so I searched dominoes on YouTube to see if there were other videos of dominoes falling and I found a whole bunch of just amazing domino videos that blew my mind.
“I had no idea that dominoes could be set up to make words, 3D structures or to build pictures and texts.
“I just thought you could do lines with dominoes but you can do so much more.”
Lily’s infectious love of domino art has built a dedicated YouTube following with a channel that now boasts over 256 million views.
But domino building is not as simple as it may appear and Hevesh has spent years honing her skills.
She said: “One of the hardest skills to learn was trying to set it up without knocking it down by accident, because it’s really easy to just accidentally bump something and then all the dominos fall down and you have to restart.
“So getting the hang of that and placing each domino accurately was something that took years to perfect.
“Even now I still knock them down by accident but I’m a lot better than where I started.”
The young artist’s passion for dominos stems from her obsession with building with legos as a child, however, she switched to dominoes when she got hooked on the hypnotic process of building them up only to watch them fall.
Every domino structure requires intense concentration and patience, so Hevesh has tuned her process to perfection during her tenure as a domino artist.
She said: “The design process starts with the idea, if I’m doing a themed project I’ll write down a list of things that I want to include in the set up, I’ll take those ideas and try to figure out how I can turn that into dominoes.
“I might do a domino field, I might do a 3D structure, there’s a whole lot of different tricks you can do with dominos so I have to find the right one that works for the at specific idea.
“Then I go to build it, first I do the structures then I do all the freehanded projects around it.
“After that I do connecting lines to make sure each trick is triggered. After that you knock it down!
While the temporary nature of domino art might put some off, Lily savours every moment of the lengthy process and hopes that her enthusiasm for dominoes will rub off on her followers.
She added: “My goal is to get domino art out there and make sure people know about it!
“I want to inspire kids to get into domino art because it’s still an emerging hobby so I want more people to be aware of this new art form.”
Now the dedicated artist has caught the attention of Hollywood and her domino structures can be spotted in Will Smith’s upcoming film Collateral Beauty.