My mother was working on her family Christmas card… she was looking to do something Wall Street Journal themed since my father sold his business this year.  She usually relies on me for graphical work and this year she asked if I could make some Wall Street Journal hedcut effect.  There is a photoshop filter out there that appears to do a woodcut-looking effect, but it’s 80 bucks.  There’s also this tutorial which is pretty good, though it’s a bit more work intensive than a Photoshop plugin.

I made a couple of changes to the process described in the tutorial.  Rather than doing a simple wave to modulate the points in the pattern, I warped them to the shape of the face, giving the face more dimension, using the Liquify filter that came with my Wacom tablet.

Secondly, I did a smart sharpen after I was done with the process rather than Poster Edges as my image was too small for poster edges to work, and the sharpen effect gives it more of a newsprint look to me.  Anyways, you can see the output above.  That’s my dad and me.  I did myself second once I was a bit better at it.

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