Hedcut is a term referring to a style of

drawing Drawing is a Visual arts, visual art that uses an instrument to mark paper or another two-dimensional surface, or a digital representation of such. Traditionally, the instruments used to make a drawing include pencils, crayons, and ink pens, some ...

associated with ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...

'' half-column portrait illustrations. The newspaper staff uses the stipple method of many small dots and the

hatching Hatching () is an artistic technique used to create tonal or shading effects by drawing (or painting or scribing) closely spaced parallel lines. When lines are placed at an angle to one another, it is called cross-hatching. Hatching is als ...

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 that ...

s 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 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 greyscale (more common in Commonwealth English) or grayscale (more common in American English) image is one in which the value of each pixel is a single sample (signal), s ...

and the contrast is adjusted in

Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe for Windows and macOS. It was created in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll. It is the most used tool for professional digital art, especially in raster graphics editin ...

. 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 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, Education center, education and Research institute, research centers, created by the Federal government of the United States, U.S. government "for the increase a ...

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

National Portrait Gallery National Portrait Gallery may refer to: * National Portrait Gallery (Australia), in Canberra * National Portrait Gallery (Sweden), in Mariefred *National Portrait Gallery (United States), in Washington, D.C. *National Portrait Gallery, London ...

. 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 Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

trained on a dataset of over 2,000 hedcut drawings and photographs. In December 2019, ''The Wall Street Journals R&D Chief Francesco Marconi announced that hedcuts published in the newspaper would continue to be created by human artists, but that the AI-driven tool would be offered to all 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.

References

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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