All about hedcuts in the Wall Street Journal.
2/24/2003
If you read the Wall Street Journal, you are familiar with hedcuts—although you may not know what they are. Hedcuts are the black-and-white drawings of the famous and infamous executives depicted on the pages of WSJ. Now the National Portrait Gallery has an online exhibition devoted to the Journal's hedcuts, which were donated by the newspaper in 2001. According to the site, the WSJ employs four full-time and two part-time artists to create the images from photographs. The collection includes side-by-side portraits of CEOs from different eras (Steve Jobs before glasses and now), a section on "Legends," and a piece on "Picturing Women." The "Getting Inside Their Heads" section details how hedcuts are done. Interesting tidbits: Each drawing takes about five hours, and women are harder to draw than men because of hairstyles. ()