WSJ Hedcut

I have always enjoyed reading the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and have always been impressed by their artists' renderings of the newsmakers. I have no illusions that I would ever be featured in my favorite newspaper, but I have always wanted my own picture done in the WSJ method. known as hedcut or stimple. Knowing too well that it would be very costly to commission an artist to do it for me, I decided to look for software alternatives. Surprising to me, despite all our advances in the computer realm there is nothing that can replace the human touch, which is why WSJ still uses artists to hand draw the hedcuts.

That said, being hard to deter, I decided that I would search for a "good enough" method, and I found the blog Alleba, where an Andrew Dela Serna came up with and described how to get a similar effect using Photoshop. I was impressed and went tor work straight away to make my own hedcut, shown here.

This is my first attempt, and given that I use Gimp, and open source alternative to Photoshop, it took me a little while to figure out how to convert Andrew's instructions. While I can't say that it is perfect, I think it was a good start.

An additional use that I thought could be fun was to take a picture of myself and convert it into a currency type photo. That way if I ever decided to get one of those custom picture credit cards, I could make myself into say a $250 bill and use that. Anyway, as you can tell by now I really like graphic design and am always looking for new creative outlets.

If anyone wants to try this, first go to Alleba Blog, and if you need further instructions for using software like Gimp, I can try and help.