Hedcut

Article summary

Hedcut is a term referring to a style of drawing associated with The Wall Street Journal half-column portrait illustrations. The newspaper staff uses the stipple method of many small dots and the hatching method of small lines to create an image, and is designed to emulate the look of woodcuts from old-style newspapers, 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 Kevin Sprouls, a freelance artist, 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, The Journal employs five hedcut artists. 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 altered photograph is printed out, placed on a light table, and overlaid with tracing vellum.…

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