A new continuous-discontinuous strategy for the simulation of failure is presented. The continuous bulk is regularised by means of a gradient-enhanced damage model, where non-locality is introduced at the level of displacements. As soon as the damage parameter is close or equal to 1, a traction-free crack is introduced. To determine the direction of crack growth, a new criterion is proposed. In contrast to traditional techniques, where mechanical criteria are used to define the crack path, here, a geometrical approach is used. More specifically, given a regularised damage field D(x), we propose to propagate the discontinuity following the direction dictated by the medial axis of the isoline (or isosurface in 3D) D(x) = D*. The proposed approach is tested on different two-dimensional and three-dimensional examples that illustrate that this combined methodology is able to deal with damage growth and material separation. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.