Cracked Sidewalk Art (Faces) Creativity Exercise

Sidewalk Crack Faces Creativity Exercise for Artists

Creating cracked sidewalk art is great for helping you improve your creativity. It forces you to create a face from pre-existing lines that you have to incorporate into your face drawing. You could do something other than faces, but it will push your creativity further if you stick with one subject matter. If all you did was draw the first thing that the cracked sidewalk reminded you of wouldn’t be as much of a challenge.

This is a really fun creativity exercise that can result in tons of new and original character ideas.

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Cracked Sidewalk Art Face Challenge

Smaller sketchbooks work really well for this exercise. You can print out some images of cracks, and glue them into the sketchbook. And then all you have to do is work on the drawings as you have time.

Just make sure you let the glue dry before trying to draw on top of the photos. If the glue is still wet it may tear the paper.

After you have your photo glued into your sketchbook, look at the cracks from different angles and look for a face to appear to you. Sometimes it will be completely obvious. But other times you’ll have to work for it a bit more.

The following examples are the drawings I did during the creativity challenge, with a focus on finding faces.

Creativity Challenge – Sphinx

This image popped out at me as soon as I looked at the photo. The way the face was reminded me of the Sphinx, so I added some legs to it. I used a black Bic marker for the drawing and then added some darker areas with my 6B graphite pencil. Prismacolor pencils were used to add in a bit of color since I used black and white photos for all of the drawings. The colors used were:

Cracked Sidewalk Art – Tiki Guy and Suspicious Face Drawing

Day two of the cracked faces drawing challenge was also immediately obvious to me. Once again, I started with a black and white photo of cracks that was glued onto a page in my sketchbook. There is actually another face that stands out to me that I may go back in and add, but it overlaps the guy on the right. It might be too much.

A Bic marker was used for the drawing and a 6b Derwent graphite pencil for the shading. I decided not to add any color to this cracked face drawing because I kind of like how it looks the way that it is.

Old Man Cracked Face Drawing

Day three turned out to look like an old man, and a quite serious one at that. Once again, I started with a black and white photo of cracks that was glued into my sketchbook using a glue stick. I looked at the cracks and an old man popped out at me. Using a Bic marker, I drew in the feature of his face. Using a Derwent 6B graphite pencil I added in some darker areas. This drawing was finished using Prismacolor colored pencils: Scarlet Lake (pc923), Raspberry (pc1030), and Tuscan Red (pc937).

Spiral Head Sidewalk Art Face

Coming up with a name for this guy was a bit of a challenge. Day four of the cracked faces drawing challenge sort of reminded me of Jigsaw. I think it’s because of the spiral on the side of his head, and I have no idea what that’s supposed to be either.

The drawing was done the same way as the others by beginning with a black and white photo of cracks. Then looking for a face to pop out at me. Again using the Bic marker, I drew in the face over the cracks on the photo. Shading was added with my 6b Derwent graphite pencil. A little color was added using Prismacolor colored pencils. The colors used were: Mineral Orange (pc1033), Dark Brown (pc946), Salmon Pink (pc1001), Tuscan Red (pc937), and Scarlet Lake (pc923). This drawing was finished off by adding in some white highlights using a Gelly roll pen.

Mr. No Eyes Cracked Face Drawing

This guy reminded me of the characters from The Simpson’s so I colored him yellow. Even though it’s a fairly basic drawing, I kind of like how he turned out. The same process was used for day five of the challenge that was used for the previous drawings.

Prismacolor pencils used: Canary Yellow (pc916), Spanish Orange (pc1003), Sienna Brown (pc945),Non-Photo Blue (pc919), Parrot Green (pc1006), and Violet Blue (pc933).

Floating Head

Day 6 of the cracked faces drawing challenge resulted in a floating head. The face itself popped out right away, but then I just couldn’t come up with anything else to do with the drawing. So, I left it as a floating head for now. I’m definitely going to revisit this one later on and try to do something more with it.

I didn’t want to spend too much time on this drawing so I only used the Bic marker and 6B graphite pencil.

Split Images

The 7th, and final, cracked face drawing was by far the most difficult to do. I thought it would be more of a challenge to split the image into two sections. Well, it was definitely more challenging for sure. I began by drawing in they eyes because they were the only obvious facial feature I found. After that, my sketchbook sat on my desk for a couple of days.

Then I decided to just start drawing things in. So I added a nose and lips. As it turned out, there were two areas on the photo of grass that ended up looking like a mustache. This last drawing ended up coming together better than I expected. I finished it up by adding in some colors to the background using Brite Purple (pc995), and Ultramarine (pc992).