Some of the most memorable street art is only half painted. The other half is already there: a drain, a crack in the plaster, a clump of ivy, a satellite dish, a statue in a park. Artists who work this way study a spot until they see a picture hiding in it, then add just enough paint, chalk or paper to make everyone else see it too.
Art historians call work made for one particular place "site-specific", a term that took hold among sculptors in the mid-1970s. On the street it usually means something smaller and more playful: a tiny cartoon riding a handrail, a face whose hair is a living bush, a camel caravan walking along a crack. Move the work, and the joke disappears.
The 28 pieces below come from Europe, North America and Asia and were made by more than a dozen artists, from the French cartoon-sniper OakOak to Banksy, Pejac and Ernest Zacharevic. We have grouped them by what each artist borrows from the street, explained what to look for, and kept the artist credit with every picture so you can follow their work further.
Why the setting does half the work
Most murals ignore the wall they sit on. Interactive street art does the opposite. The artist starts with a feature that a passer-by would normally overlook and gives it a new role: a pipe becomes a tongue, a crack becomes a spider's thread, a bollard becomes a cigarette. That moment of recognition, when the viewer realises which part was painted and which part was always there, is what makes people stop, laugh and take a photo.
It also explains why these works are so hard to make. Each one has to be designed for a single spot, often at an unusual scale and from a single viewing angle. Many are small and fragile, made with paste-ups, chalk or quick stencils that weather away within months. Plants grow, walls are repainted, and objects get moved. For many of the pieces below, the photograph is now the main surviving record.
OakOak's tiny cartoons in French streets
OakOak is a street artist from Saint-Étienne in central France, known for small, quick interventions that drop cartoon and film characters into everyday damage and street furniture. Most of his pieces are no bigger than a sheet of paper.
Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson's boy and tiger, sled down a curved metal handrail as if it were a snowy slope. The rail's downward bend gives the scene its sense of speed. Credit: OakOak.
The source gallery listed a Bruce Lee piece from OakOak's home city here, but the photo it used is the same handrail scene as above. OakOak has painted several film-hero figures interacting with walls and pavements, and the Bruce Lee work is one of them. Credit: OakOak.
A long vertical crack running down an ochre wall becomes the silk thread from which a small Spider-Man dangles upside down. It is a perfect example of OakOak's method: the crack existed first, and the character was invented to explain it. Credit: OakOak.
A thin line of camel silhouettes walks along the uneven edge where old render meets a low wall, turning the ridge into a line of desert dunes. The title borrows from a French proverb, roughly "the dogs bark, the caravan moves on". Credit: OakOak.
A grey breeze block standing on a pavement has two holes and a slot that look like a startled face. OakOak added a pair of pale hands and a dark robe, and Edvard Munch's famous The Scream appeared on the kerb. Credit: OakOak.
Calvin and Hobbes again, this time strolling up a creeping vine as if it were a hillside path. Because the vine is alive, the scene changed with every season. Credit: OakOak.
The foot of a metal construction barrier is pushed into a concrete block whose holes resemble a face, so OakOak painted a splash of red around the pole to make it look as if the block had been poked in the eye. Like much of his work, it relies on dark slapstick rather than real violence. Credit: OakOak.
A barred window in an old wall becomes a prison cell for Sideshow Bob, the hapless villain from The Simpsons, whose spiky red hair fills the frame behind the bars. Credit: OakOak.
A narrow split in a wooden door frames Jack Nicholson's face from the "Here's Johnny!" scene in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining. The damaged door supplies exactly the broken panel that Nicholson's character smashes through with an axe. Credit: OakOak.
Kenny from South Park, in his orange parka, stands at the end of a crack running down a wall, as though he has just escaped one of his many on-screen misfortunes. The style matches OakOak's, but the photo reached the source gallery via the Tumblr account credited here. Credit: memeirl.
When plants become hair, feathers and pom-poms
Living plants are a favourite material because they grow, change colour and refuse to stay still. These artists paint around them and let nature finish the picture.
On a block wall in the capital of Martinique, a grinning painted man scratches his head under a real, untrimmed shrub that serves as his wild hair. The photo was taken at night, when the street lamp makes the bush glow like a hairdo under a spotlight. Credit: Nuxuno Xän.
A large black-and-white face on a concrete retaining wall wears a crown of Virginia creeper as hair. It comes from fauxreel, the alias of Toronto artist Dan Bergeron, whose Face of the City project pasted portraits of local people onto the city's walls. Credit: fauxreel.
On a pink outbuilding in Athens, a bird's head and two hungry chicks are painted around a mass of climbing plants, which form the bird's leafy body and nest. WD, short for Wild Drawing, is an Athens-based muralist whose large animal pieces often merge with whatever is growing nearby. Credit: WD.street.art.
Two painted arms reach out from a white London wall on either side of a tuft of ivy, as if someone were holding it up. The second photo makes the piece even funnier: a council worker in a hi-vis vest trims the plant, unwittingly giving the painted figure a haircut. The source gallery credited Banksy; we could not find the piece among his authenticated works, so treat that attribution as unconfirmed. Credit: banksy (attributed).
Two clumps of grass growing out of a cracked kerb become the pom-poms of a cartoon cheerleader in a pink skirt, leaping across the tarmac. French artist Sandrine Boulet is known for this kind of playful pavement collage. Credit: Sandrine Boulet.
A clipped round shrub in front of a wooden fence becomes the body of an ostrich, with a long painted neck and head rising up the boards behind it. The credit goes to Pao, an Italian street artist best known for turning Milan's concrete bollards into penguins and cartoon characters. Credit: Pao.
Sluggo, a green, eye-stalked creature, rakes a pile of real autumn leaves into a painted crack in the pavement. He is a recurring character of David Zinn, a chalk artist from Ann Arbor, Michigan, whose temporary drawings vanish with the next rain. Credit: David Zinn.
Murals that borrow buildings and street objects
Larger murals use architecture itself: windows, gables, drains and rooftop equipment become props in the scene.
Polish artist Natalia Rak painted a giant girl in folk costume on the end wall of a Białystok apartment block, tipping a watering can over a real tree that grows below. Completed in 2013, it became one of the most widely shared murals of the decade because the living tree finishes the story. Credit: Natalia Rak.
A row of real satellite dishes on a brick wall becomes the bells of giant orange horns, each one blown by a tiny painted figure. It is a sly joke about where all that broadcast noise comes from. Credit: Davyd Samuels (as credited by Street Art Utopia).
A huge painted girl in a blue dress appears to lean over the roof of a shophouse in George Town, Penang, as if peering down at the street. Lithuanian-born artist Ernest Zacharevic, who is based in Penang, painted a series of murals for the George Town Festival in 2012 that helped turn the city's old quarter into a street-art destination. Credit: Ernest Zacharevich.
Two painted children ride a real, rusting bicycle fixed to the wall: Zacharevic's "Children on a Bicycle", one of the best-known works from his 2012 George Town series. Visitors queue to pose on the bike, which makes the mural even more interactive than he planned. Credit: Ernest Zacharevich.
Between three barred windows, white tape shapes form a plus sign and an equals sign, so the façade reads "window plus window equals window". New York artist Aakash Nihalani makes these crisp, isometric tape pieces, which can be removed without damaging the wall. Credit: Aakash Nihalani.
A storm drain painted as a sleepy face, a steel post turned into a giant cigarette held by painted fingers, and puffs of white smoke on the asphalt. It comes from 6emeia, a Brazilian street-art project known for transforming drains, manholes and kerbs in São Paulo. Credit: 6emeia.com.
Works with something to say
Not every interactive piece is a gag. Some use the same trick to deliver a message about the environment, labour or the city.
A painted world map is drawn as if it were liquid trickling into a storm drain at the edge of a path. Spanish artist Pejac (Silvestre Santiago, born 1977 in Santander) often uses silhouettes and trompe-l'œil to comment on pollution and climate change, and this piece makes the point in a single image. Credit: pejac.
This is Banksy's "Slave Labour", which appeared on the side of a Poundland shop in Wood Green, north London, in 2012, around Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee. A child at a sewing machine stitches Union Jack bunting, and real bunting runs off the wall. In 2013 the section of wall was removed and listed for auction in Miami, where it was withdrawn after local protests, before being offered again in London. Credit: banksy.
Beside a bronze statue of a sower in a Kaunas park, Lithuanian artist Morfai painted a scatter of dark seeds across the wall behind it. By day a street sweeper works below, and at night a lamp casts the statue's shadow onto the wall so that the shadow appears to be sowing the painted seeds. The two photos show how much the work depends on light. Credit: morfai.
Seen from a high window, dark lines trodden into the snow of a courtyard form a giant pair of spectacles, as if someone had dropped their glasses. The work is credited to P183, the Moscow artist Pavel Pukhov (1983–2013), sometimes called the "Russian Banksy", whose installations often played with the city's public spaces. Credit: P183.
A giant paper portrait of a man in a swimming cap is pasted onto a canal wall, with a bright pink tube running from his mouth into the water, as if he were drinking the canal through a straw. The reflection doubles the face. Credit: mentalgassi, a Berlin-based paste-up collective.
How to find, photograph and respect this kind of art
If these pieces make you want to look at your own streets differently, a few habits help.
- Look low and look close. Many interactive works sit at kerb height, on drainpipes or in cracks. OakOak's characters are often smaller than a hand.
- Take two photos. One close-up shows the joke; one wider shot shows the drain, plant or window the artist used. Without the setting, the work loses half its meaning.
- Credit the artist and the place. When you share a photo, name the artist and the city if you know them. That is how small artists build an audience, and how readers find more of their work.
- Do not remove or "rescue" pieces. The Banksy wall removed from Wood Green caused anger precisely because the work belonged to the neighbourhood that hosted it.
- Remember that permission matters. Some of these works were commissioned or made at festivals; others were unofficial. If you want to try something similar, chalk, removable tape and community mural schemes are good starting points.
Most of all, keep an eye on the ordinary things you walk past every day. A crack, a weed or a satellite dish may be waiting for someone to notice what it could become.
Sources: Artists' websites and pages linked in each credit; original compilation by Bored Panda; Wikipedia: Site-specific art; Wikipedia: Pejac; Wikipedia: Ernest Zacharevic; Wikipedia: Banksy; Wikipedia: P183.
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fantastic ideas
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