A Different Kind of Hedcut

Back when I was doing hedcut stipple portraits at The Wall Street Journal, I was also moonlighting, which led to a different kind of hedcut. One particular party who took an interest in my work was an art director at Grey advertising named Gary Friedland. Gary and I developed a friendly working relationship as we created some major ads for an investment fund called Texas Commerce Bancshares.These ads were to run in the major national newspapers, including The Journal. My dilemma was how to stay under the radar with my bosses at the WSJ. I wasn’t yet ready to rock the boat at my day job!So, I developed an alternative style, one that I hoped would be different enough from the WSJ hedcut portraits to evade detection. The full-page ad as it ran in the Journal looked like this:As you can see, it was a lot of work for yours truly. Gary was patient, and orchestrated the entire process— one of the good art directors I’ve worked with.Here are three individual portraits from the group… you might recognize them:

Boone Pickens

Barbara Jordan

U.S President Gerald Ford

This was one of the projects that helped me to strike out on my own as a freelance illustrator.