Hedcut is a term referring to a style of drawing, associated with ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'' half-column portrait illustrations. They use the stipple method of many small dots and the

hatching Hatching (french: hachure) is an artistic technique used to create tonal or shading Shading refers to the depiction of depth perception in 3D models (within the field of 3D computer graphics) or illustrations (in visual art) by varying ...

method of small lines to create an image, and are designed to emulate the look of

woodcut Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. Areas tha ...

s from old-style

newspaper A newspaper is a Periodical literature, periodical publication containing written News, information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as p ...

s, and engravings on certificates and currency. The phonetic spelling of "hed" may be based on newspapers' use of the term ''hed'' for "headline." ''The Wall Street Journal'' adopted the current form of this portraiture in 1979 when freelance artist Kevin Sprouls approached the paper with some ink dot illustrations he had created. The front page editor felt that the drawings complemented the paper's classical feeling and gave it a sense of stability. Additionally, they are generally more legible than photographs of the same size would be. Sprouls was subsequently hired as a staff illustrator and remained there until 1987. Today, there are five hedcut artists employed by The Wall Street Journal. Each drawing takes between three and five hours to produce. First, a high quality photograph must be obtained. This photograph is then converted to

grayscale In digital photography, computer-generated imagery, and colorimetry, a grayscale image is one in which the value of each pixel is a single sample representing only an ''amount'' of light; that is, it carries only intensity information. Graysc ...

and the contrast is adjusted in

Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the industry standard not only in raster ...

. The altered photograph is printed out, placed on a light table, and overlaid with tracing vellum. The illustrators then trace directly over this image with ink pens, recreating the source photo using specific dot and line patterns. The final tracing is then scanned back into Photoshop where it can be colorized if needed or otherwise adjusted. These drawings are traditionally created at 18 by 31 picas (), and then later reduced to fit the column size. Women are sometimes more difficult to depict than men as they tend to have more complicated haircuts, which are often cropped for simplicity. This allows the women's portraits to fit into the same size frame as the men's without reducing the relative scale of the women's faces. In 2002 the

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...

acquired 66 original hedcut drawings and have put them on permanent display in the National Portrait Gallery. A March 18, 2010 video produced by ''The Wall Street Journal'' shows the artists at work. In 2019 The Wall Street Journal began developing a proprietary application that generated custom hedcut portraits using machine learning. In December 2019 the news organization began offering the service to all of its members in order to "democratize" the illustrations and create an ongoing repository of photos for the app to continue to learn from in order to better refine its results.{{cite web, last1=Bleed, first1=Evelyn, title=How the Wall Street Journal developed its make-your-own hedcut feature, url=https://www.storybench.org/how-the-wall-street-journal-developed-its-make-your-own-hedcut-feature/, website=Storybench, date=23 February 2020 , accessdate=23 February 2020

References

External links

History of WSJ Hedcuts
mdash;Article on the artists and history behind the WSJ hedcut portraits

mdash;exhibit "Picturing Business in America: Hedcuts in the Wall Street Journal"
Kevin Sprouls Blog
mdash;Blog showcasing art of Kevin Sprouls, originator of the Hedcut portrait style
Square Gear Gimp Tips - Hedcut
mdash;Gimp tutorial and equivalent Gimp script Illustration The Wall Street Journal