Andy Gilmore – Hand-drawn work
A free hand
If you’re familiar with Andy’s work, then you’ve doubtless been astonished by the elaborately intricate meshes of lines and circles and colourful explosions that reveal more details the closer you look. What’s perhaps even more remarkable is that most of these works start out hand-drawn and many remain that way. You can see a selection of Andy’s hand-drawn work here, that also demonstrates the diversity of what he can do. There’s a bird’s head that seems to be made up of coloured speed lines that come together to create the purplish-blue you see here. Or other masses of dots and lines that coalesce, almost impossibly, to form faces. Then there are pencil lines on graph paper, creating shapes, with absolute accuracy, that aren’t there on the paper. Or chalk on black board, that looks like the birth of alien dimensions. And all drawn by the same hand.
We asked Andy a few questions about how he creates these pieces:
Does all your work begin with drawing something by hand?
Not all of it, but the practice of drawing has certainly informed my digital work and vice-versa.
This may sound an odd question, but how do you even begin conceiving some of your more complex works? Do you just get started and see where it goes, or do you have a very specific form in mind?
It depends – sometimes I get really into drawing freely and seeing what emerges and other times I have an idea of what I am aiming for. A lot of the time the previous drawing will inform how I approach the subsequent drawing. It is very much an inner dialogue that is continuous from drawing to drawing.
Do you use any kind of mathematical formulas in creating something like the pieces on graph paper?
No, the grid drawings start in a sketchbook, the first drawing informs the following drawing and they tend to get more complex, page after page.
What materials do you use? For example, I wouldn’t think of chalk as being a precise medium, and yet you seem to achieve absolute precision when you use it.
The chalk drawing began as a series of drawings I had done on black paper using white ink pens, rulers, circles, and hexagon templates. I then rendered them in white chalk to create depth and dimension and added a top coat of ink to heighten the precision. I still love the process of drawing them by hand with pen and rulers, but lately, I have been using my pen-plotter to draw the root line drawing, which I create in Illustrator, and then I render them in chalk, ink, and acrylics applied with a brush.
Do you draw on a completely different aspect of your artistic ability for more representational work, like the bird’s head shown here.
I think that having identical twin sisters heightened my visual acuity, attention, and retention of visual details – which I think applies to all of my creative pursuits.
Again, how do you go about creating pieces like ‘Ghostly’ and the faces shown here, that seem to emerge from a mass of dots and lines?
I drew these at a time in my life in which I was having some issues with my dominant right hand, so I began drawing with my left in more of a stippling manner. I would apply dots and little lines until an image would emerge as we tend to see animals and faces in a cloud formation.
To see more of Andy’s work, click to see his portfolios here.
