You have probably seen this pen and ink drawing of Michael Arrington in a recent story about Techcrunch published in The Wall Street Journal. These distinctive dot sketch portraits of celebrities in the WSJ are popularly known as HedCut drawings composed only of tiny ink dots and lines and is unique to the paper. They are drawn by hand [no computers] using just pencils for tracing and ink pens to emulate the look of woodcuts from old-style newspapers, and engravings on certificates and currency.
Wall St. Journal editors have had no love for real pictures since they felt that one word was worth a thousand pictures. Most of the pages on the WSJ don't have photographs except for showing advertisements. So their artists gave birth to a new HedCut style of portraits or dot drawings which maintained their "no-picture policy on Page 1" and also preserved the gray appearance of the paper.
Now the WSJ has a small in-house art staff for drawing these HedCut portraits. Each headiest drawing in The WSJ takes between three to five hours to produce. Great attention is paid to shadows and highlights. Women are often more difficult to depict than men, due to their more complicated haircuts.
This PDF document on Dow Jones site, titled How a Photo becomes a Wall Street Journal HedCut, provide a glimpse on what goes behind the scenes to convert a regular photograph into a Wall Street Journal portrait in 5 steps.
The Journal’s graphic style calls for a gray, evenly developed drawing, so the illustrator darkens shadowy areas with a combination of parallel counter lines, cross-hatching and dotting technique.But don't waste your time looking for Photoshop plugins or software to convert your photos into Wall Street Journal style illustrations - chances are that you won't find any.
But if you still want to have your own Wall street style portrait, either create a company like Yahoo or Youtube to attract Wall Street reporters. If that sounds too big, take the services of popular stippling artists like Kevin Sprouls, Randy and Noli Novak who create most of these iconic style Hedcut drawings for the Wall Str. Journal.
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/11/hedcut-drawing-wall-street-journal.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Not entirely correct that one cannot create these easily.
Adobe Illustrator CS2 has a live trace feature with a variety of controls and types to get similar effects. How well you master them comes down to skill with the program, but in its ver y basic sense its a breeze to use.
Written on 8/11/06 2:20 AM
I don't need any software to draw this sketches. In my younger days I did these kind of hand drawing (Line, Striple and Pencil) frequently with the help of a Crowquil or Rotering Pen + Black
waterproof ink. This needs a lot of physical labour and strain to the eyes but in India there's no one to pay you for your labour. Also the people has one more misconception that with computer they can do anything but it has its limitations. I no more do drawings but I know I am still capable of sketching.
Also we can draw line sketches in Corel Draw (any version) as vector.
Thanks for sharing this article in your site.
Anil Sinha
Written on 15/11/06 5:59 PM
Am I right that there was a time, within the last 50 years, when there were no photographs in the Wall Street Journal? (At least not outside of advertisements.)
Written on 15/1/07 5:24 AM
For atlasdog, (et al):
I worked at a WSJ printing/composing plant 1983-1987. Best I can remember, sometime toward the end of this period or shortly afterward Dow Jones & Co., Inc.(publisher of WSJ) changed the paper's layout from 2 sections to 3 and was just starting to use 'spot color', (large patches, stripes etc) and beginning to make some noise about using photos. I can't remember if photos started before I left or sometime afterward because it has been 20 years.
This should give you a reasonably approximate timeframe.
I was not a writer :O)
Written on 29/3/07 2:57 AM