Colony Little, Culture Shock Art

File this in: “random knowledge that may impress”:

• your 1%er friends
• your boss
• artsy folk that you would rather talk Pop Culture with but instead pontificate on the latest Christie’s auction…
• people who read the Wall Street Journal
• the one person you know that has been on Jeopardy

Alternative File:  “random knowledge that will likely render you a geek to most people which ok, because you like to drop obscure facts and non sequiturs on people and leave an air of awkward in your wake”

Anyway, I frequently read the Wall Street Journal and I love their use of illustrative portraits instead of photography.

Last week I came across a beautiful illustration of Thelma Golden, the Director of the Studio Museum in Harlem on Instagram.  The piece was featured in the September issue of the Wall Street Journal Magazine.

I loved it and quickly learned that it’s called a “Hedcut” (aka stipple drawings).  Hedcuts are the ink dot illustrations that are synonymous with the Wall Street Journal’s brand identity, but are also used in a variety of artistic mediums. While the picture itself is called a “Hedcut”, the process of creating dot ink illustrations using shadows and contouring is called “stippling”.

Literally within 10 minutes of learning these fun facts last week, I walked by this mural that looks like they used the same type of gradient shadowing, resulting in a short stroke, graf equivalent of stippling!

Consider me fascinated.  I now want a stipple avatar!

For more on Hedcuts , Stipple and the artists that create them, check out this article by the Wall Street Journal.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704207504575129961786135180