Still Amazed

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I understand that everybody already knows about this form of art, but i still find the complexity of the illusion astounding. I am talking about sidewalk art. This link ( includes 20 separate pictures of this style of artwork. The artists play with our perception as the obviously two dimensional sidewalk suddenly starts to pop out with a three dimensional image. The images range from elaborate murals to over sized soda bottles. To create these the artist plays with our monocular cues. We know many things from everyday life, such as more distant objects seem smaller, and darker spots are shaded from the light source. Binocular cues are useless because the image is two dimensional in reality.


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The result of sidewalk art really amazing to analyze. Not only is the artistic ability of the artists amazing, but the way our brain processes this art initially as reality. The idea of illusions as a whole are very interesting but it is also, in a way, frightening how easy it is for our brains to be tricked.

It is amazing. Artists must have to think about perception and sensation to create such wonders. Just thinking about it makes me go crazy; how is it possible? Your blog proves that the human brain has the ability to process phenomenal information, but at the same time the brain believes what the eyes see and is sometimes a victim of deception.

I think this artist is very talented. I still don't understand how he can create such realistic images without standing in the place where it looks realistic. I have seen these images from other views, where everything seems distorted and that's how he has to see it when he is creating them. It's pretty amazing.

I would like to know more about the artists in this case, how long does it take them to draw these sidewalk chalk drawings and how do they figure out how long to make their lines and what angles and curves so that they play with our perception perfectly?

I think sidewalk art is some of the most creative and talented work out there. It amazes me how someone can create images like that to fit our perception correctly.

I think this person has to have more of an ability to understand perception than an actual artistic ability, although i realize that they do have to have somewhat of an ability to be able to draw these pictures in the first place. But i think that this type of art requires more of a ability to understand perception rather than pure artistic ability.

It is incredibly to think that an artist is able to create this. The sense of perception when looking at it is altered, so I cannot even imagine attempting to draw it. Like the comment above, I agree that the skill needed to draw this is much more than artistic ability but borders on an amazing sense of perception as well.

I wonder how different the experience would be to see these drawings in person as opposed to images of them. It's difficult for me to imagine creating something like this because, like burke545 said, the perception is so altered. I think my brain would get very overwhelmed switching back and forth between the 2D surface of the ground and the perceived 3D drawing.

I stumble a lot. When you stumble a lot, you see a lot of cool things. Among these cool things are sidewalk illusions and I am always so excited when I stumble upon these works of art. I find it so amazing that people are able to make these things out of such basic public structures like sidewalks and random walls. Seeing these always makes me appreciate the human race for our creativity and artistic abilities.

These images and images like these ones are almost too real to be true. It's truly amazing how we can warp images to trick our mind into seeing something that is not there or not what we perceive it to be. Funny how complex our brains are that they can be tricked by some little things.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by ian published on February 19, 2012 11:55 AM.

Becoming Self-Aware was the previous entry in this blog.

Super Sensitive Senses is the next entry in this blog.
