Wall Street Journal reveals all about stipple “headcuts”
A story in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal provided a look behind the famous stipple “headcuts” one sees in that paper.
If you can suffer through the opening advertisement, you might find this video interesting:
Talking points:
- The headcut staff consists of four staff artists and four free-lancers.
- A typical headcut takes two to five hours. The artists prefer to have five hours, obviously.
- The headcuts are drawn 3 inches by 5 inches and then reduced to the half-column size at which they run.
- The artists now work from home. They receive their assignments via e-mail, print out the photos, trace with rapidograph-on-vellum, and then send their scanned art back to the office via e-mail.
- The tradition of the stipple portraits didn’t begin until 1979. Granted, I would have been a 12-grader then. But the tradition doesn’t go back as far as I would have thought.
“We don’t use computers,” Journal artist Noli Novak
is quoted as saying. “Everything is done by hand. …
And we keep the process sacred.”
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Tiger Woods, left, was included as a sample with the story. I found Stephon Marbury on a WSJ PDF I had on my hard drive:
Interesting how they’re both sports figures. I wonder if the subject matter of stipple headcuts has shifted a bit over the past few years.
I found another WSJ page-one PDF on my hard drive — one that contained a drawing of an eight-track tape, believe it or not. And today’s front page includes art of medical marijuana:
Even though we’ve always referred to these drawings as “stipple,” you’ll find a lot more crosshatching than stipple here. Especially on the eight-track.