Artist Jan Riggins usually portrays holiday scenes on the sidewalks of the Shops at Park Lane around this time of year, but the World Series derailed those plans.
“I had a holiday piece planed but after the [Texas] Rangers won, it seems a little more fitting to celebrate that,” Riggins says.
Riggins chalked up a three-dimensional portrait of World Series MVP Corey Seager that shows the screaming shortstop bursting out of the pavement from a Texas-shaped crevasse. She posted it to her social media and it’s been shared and liked over 1,200 times just on her Instagram.
“It kind of started happening right away,” Riggins says. “Last night before I went to bed, I could see it was getting more traction than my normal stuff.”
Riggins’ art doesn’t hang in museums and galleries or even on walls. She travels the country and the world drawing three-dimensional sidewalk portraits. She started creating her unique and eye-catching art just before the pandemic at chalk art festivals. Coronavirus threw off those plans, so she and her daughter Olivia started drawing in their driveway. Their neighbors loved the artwork. By the time the pandemic ended, they had created a portrait of everyone in the neighborhood.
“I joined chalk art a couple of years before COVID and participated in a few local festivals and when COVID hit, I couldn’t do the festival so I started to do it at my house,” Riggins says. “The neighbors really liked it and wanted us to do it for their driveways and we did about 80 the first year.”
The portraits started to catch fire online, and soon Riggins and her daughter were invited to festivals and even by companies to create 3D sidewalk art. Riggins has drawn 3D portraits for companies at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin and the American Airlines Center, where a large portrait of Dallas music queen Erykah Badu got the artist a guest spot on Kelly Clarkson’s daytime talk show. The city of Grapevine hires her every year during the holidays to do several portraits on Main Street’s sidewalks for its annual outdoor festival.
Courtesy of Jan Riggins” class=”uk-display-block uk-position-relative uk-visible-toggle”>
Artist Jan Riggins drew this impressive 3D portrait of a goldfish in a bag at a chalk art festival in Lewisville.
Courtesy of Jan Riggins
Riggins’ portraits use a force perspective to create their three-dimensional illusions. They look like warped images that have been cartoonishly stretched out, but when you walk around them, the portrait morphs into something that looks like its sticking out of the cement.
“First, I have to decide on how big of a space I have and I have to stretch the design so when its viewed correctly, it’ll look 3D,” Riggins says. “Then I grid it. I put a grid on the ground and copy each square exactly like it is on the paper.”
The Texas Rangers portrait took her about 18 hours to sketch and draw on the sidewalk at the Shops at Park Lane. The process of creating the portraits involves a lot of moving around to get the perspectives just right, which can be quite a workout.
“It looks abstract when I work on it because the eyes don’t look like eyes because they’re stretched out,” Riggins says. “So you have to keep hopping up and adjusting.”
The work is worth the payoff. She and her daughter are constantly in demand (when Olivia isn’t in school, of course), and they always seem to win a large amount of viral attention.
“It’s been a great time,” Riggins says.
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