Chrisonomicon

Thursday, March 13, 2003

The Wall Street Journal is well known for its stylized sketches known as " hedcuts," which have graced front pages of the paper for more than two decades. Hand-drawn by a small staff of artists, each portrait takes approximately 5 hours to complete and is composed of hundreds of tiny dots and lines, a technique known as stippling. This produces pictures that closely resemble engravings on stock certificates and currency, apt for the wordbound appearance of The Journal, which adopted the illustration technique during a makeover in 1979. The drawings have since become an American icon.

The technique was actually invented by Dutch artists in the early 17th century to engrave glass. Using a diamond or tungsten-steel point, artists would carve countless dots into the delicate medium, building up dense areas as highlights that would show white against the plain-glass shadows. The technique loses none of its appeal on paper, however, complimenting paper's monochromatic aesthetic and offering a number of practical benefits, such as enabling The Journal to use a wide variety of photo sources without regard to the picture quality.

Having developed a systematic method for creating hedcuts, the paper has been able to maintain a uniform style over the years and allows multiple artists to finish one portrait. This looks like it would be fairly easy to accomplish in Photoshop. I've yet to find a good method for doing so, however. One possibility is creating an outline using a pencil filter, and overlaying another layer that has been bitmapped. Besides whipping out the trusty pen and paper, anyone have any other ideas or filter suggestions?