The first rotating WSJ hedcut

Barbara Chai of The Wall Street Journal writes about how the paper’s first 3-d hedcut was produced and posted online Thursday with its story about people who build things with Legos for a living.

Chai writes, “The print story includes a hedcut, or dot-ink portrait, of a Lego sculpture by artist Nathan Sawaya, called ‘Yellow,’ of a Lego man ripping open his chest.

“For the first time, The Wall Street Journal Online created a rotating hedcut, with ‘Yellow.’ Readers can click and drag the hedcut and turn it 360 degrees. The rotating portrait was created by artist Bill Hallinan, who made eight different drawings of ‘Yellow’ using photographs taken by Dov Friedman.

“Hallinan says creating each illustration was challenging. If you look closely, the hedcut is more of an impression of Legos, rather than of individual Legos stacked onto one another as in the photograph. ‘My initial approach was seeing the shapes and everything, but drawing Legos is kind of strange because you can’t go in there and draw each individual edge of each Lego,’ he says. ‘It would look weird doing each brick and it would have taken me forever.’

“So Hallinan took the same approach as he does with regular portraits: build up from the darks. ‘I go right into the shadow areas and build up from there,’ he says. ‘Once I started that approach, I was able to see where I needed to go with it.'”

Read more here.