Hedcut is a term referring to a style of drawing

Drawing

Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...

, associated with The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....

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

Hatching

Hatching is an artistic technique used to create tonal or shading effects by drawing closely spaced parallel lines...

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

Woodcut

Woodcut—occasionally known as xylography—is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges...

s from old-style newspaper

Newspaper

A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...

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

Kevin Sprouls

Kevin Sprouls is the creator of the Wall Street Journal portrait style known as hedcut.He began as a freelance illustrator for Dow Jones and Company, the parent company for The Wall Street Journal. In 1979 he introduced a style of stipple portraiture that the Journal adopted because it was...

 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 six hedcut artists on staff.

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 and the contrast is adjusted in Photoshop. The photograph is then printed and 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 (3" by 5.167"), 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

Smithsonian Institution

The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...

 acquired 66 original hedcut drawings and have put them on permanent display in the National Portrait Gallery

National Portrait Gallery (United States)

The National Portrait Gallery is an art gallery in Washington, D.C., administered by the Smithsonian Institution. Its collections focus on images of famous individual Americans.-Building:...

.

External links

• Video Tutorial—How WSJ Hedcut Drawings are Made
• History of WSJ Hedcuts—Article on the artists and history behind the WSJ hedcut portraits
• Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery—exhibit "Picturing Business in America: Hedcuts in the Wall Street Journal"
• Automated hedcuts—Photoshop tutorial for generating hedcut style graphics