Hedcut

Hedcut is a term referring to a style of drawing, associated with The Wall Street Journal half-column portrait illustrations. These drawings are traditionally 18 by 31 picas (3" by 5.167"), and use the stipple method of many small dots and the hatching method of small lines to create an image. They are 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 freelance artist Kevin Sprouls approached the paper with some ink dot illustrations he'd 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. Women are sometimes more difficult to depict than men, due to their more complicated haircuts, which get cropped for simplicity and to allow them to fit into the same sized frame without reducing the scale of the portrait.

In 2002 the Smithsonian Institution acquired 66 original hedcut drawings and have put them on permanent display in the National Portrait Gallery.