by Lois Gibson
As I’ve demonstrated in previous chapters, I have yet to sit down with anyone for a sketching session in which the person does not protest that he or she doesn’t think they can contribute anything towards getting a good likeness. People who have been victimized or witnesses will insist that they didn’t see the suspect very well or that they don’t know where to start to describe him or you’ll hear from the cops that the witness is too young or too old or too feeble or blind or whatever to contribute the information for a credible sketch.
I tell my forensic art classes, “Expect a train wreck!”
Expect to hear objections, sometimes even when the sketch is completed. Remember the chapter “Blind Justice,” where the witness made me throw the sketch in the trash and the detective not only retrieved it, but went on to solve the crime with it? Remember “A Look of Murderous Rage,” when the young victim felt that the sketch, “looks too much like a girl?”
You will get resistance at every step of the way, from all sides. The danger of this is that you may doubt yourself. I had done as many as 2,000 sketches before I began to trust my own ability and to this day, I still have to psyche myself up sometimes and mull over past successes before going in to do what I know will be a difficult sketch.
And yet I’ve gotten successful sketches from people whose throats have been cut so they couldn’t talk, people who only saw the suspect in the dark at a distance, children five years of age, people who’d seen the suspect months or even years before… I could go on and on here, but suffice it to say that if you expect resistance and difficulty, you’ll be much more able to ignore it and go on and do your job.
If someone had only said this to me when I was first starting out, I would not have doubted myself so much for so many years.
Later, we’ll talk about how to get the most reluctant witness to give you a good sketch, but for now I want to emphasize another important point.
The third most important thing you need to know.
Have you ever heard that old saying that success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration?
I’d like to flip that around and say that success as a forensic sketch artist is 10 percent talent and 90 percent persistence, persistence, persistence.
If you live in an area in which law enforcement officers have not been receptive to forensic artists, you have to change their minds. And the only way to do that is, quite simply, not to give up, to keep trying.
Remember how I first started out? Calling and calling and calling? I called the HPD dozens of times before they finally brought me in to do a sketch.
And I proved that a forensic composite could help get the bad guy, didn’t I?
In the beginning, if the resistance is very great, you can offer to do the first few sketches without charge, just to establish that you can do it. If it takes three tries to get a hit—and I’ve known many artists who got major hits on their very first try—then do half a dozen sketches for them. Remind the cops that you will only get better with practice and the only way to practice is to do more sketches.
When it comes time to discuss your fee and they insist that they don’t have the money to employ a forensic artist, whip out the grant availability information that you’ve downloaded from your computer and show them creative ways they can, indeed, afford your services.
Offer your services to help with high-profile crimes. Read the newspapers daily, watch for cases that seem to be stumping the detectives, walk in off the street and say, “I would never try to tell you guys how to do your jobs or anything, but I have this skill that I think could be highly useful to you. Let me show you how.”
If they use you a time or two and then seem to drop off the radar screen, don’t sit around and mope over your hurt feelings. Call them back! Offer to help again!
Cultivate any detectives who have seemed impressed with your work. Follow their cases and offer to help whenever you can.
Call. Call again. Keep calling.
When you’re still trying to break into the field, work to hone your skills by working with non-victims. As I’ve mentioned, my husband Sid would come home from work each day and describe some new guy for me to draw. My friend Diane helped me by describing the gas station attendant for me. Practice like this enables you to do sketches faster, so that when your first golden opportunity arises, you’ll be ready.
A quote from Winston Churchill has inspired me and I have repeated it to myself through the years:
“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty—never give in….”
Characteristics of a good forensic sketch artist.
The best forensic artists I know have a real passion for the work. In spite of the difficulties and obstacles, they love what they do and remain enthusiastic year after year, whenever they get “hits” on sketches. It’s not just catching criminals—though that’s part of it—it’s the deep personal satisfaction that they feel in knowing that the contribution of their gifts and talents helped a crime victim to become a crime survivor.
Once a job like this gets in your blood, you can’t imagine doing anything else and you can’t believe that you actually get paid to do something you love so much.
But as I pointed out earlier in the chapter, there are certain characteristics a good forensic sketch artist needs to possess beyond artistic talent and the ability to draw faces well. Some of them include: empathy, patience, sensitivity to others, a good sense of humor and ability to laugh and to make others laugh easily, flexibility and a certain gentle firmness in working with obstructive people.
Faith in God helps a lot, too—or, at the very least—faith in being a part of something much greater than just yourself.
And now, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of compositry.
The three most basic rules of composite sketch creation:
1) Sketch in private with the witness.
Remember one of the first sketches I ever did, in which the victim’s best friend sat in on the session and proceeded to dominate—even going so far as to correct the witness’s own memory? I’d like to point out here that the suspect was not caught and I learned a very valuable lesson.
I simply have a standing rule, now, that all witnesses work with me alone, in privacy. Certainly there are exceptions to every rule, such as the case of the woman who’d been beaten nearly to death by Theodore Goynes. When I went to her home to do the sketch, her husband insisted on staying in the room and in that particular case, I could see that his presence had a calming effect on the witness.
It’s a judgment call and every case is unique.
But in my experience, I have found that, in most cases, most witnesses are actually relieved to be doing the sketch without the protective presence of friends, boyfriends, spouses, or other family members. Even children are happy to have their parents out of the room. (Under the age of five, however, I do invite parents to stay.)
As with that early rape case where the best friend took over the interview—sometimes even the most well-meaning friends and relatives can inject a certain tension into the proceedings. (I’ll go into that in more detail later.)
Not only that, but legally it does present a dilemma to investigators, who do not want to be accused of having influenced the witness’s memory in any way.
Working in privacy vastly improves the relaxation of the witness, helps concentration and avoids any speculation that the witness was influenced by any outside source—even detectives.
2) Use visual aids.
This is such an important point that I’m going to repeat it:
USE VISUAL AIDS.
I emphasize this point so much because there is a very pernicious myth making the rounds out there that if a forensic artist uses visual aids to assist the witnesses in creating a composite sketch, then the artist has contaminated the witness’s memory and thus polluted the sketching process to such a point that it will be impossible to get an accurate rendering.
At least one high-profile forensic artist I know, but will not name, goes on nationally televised talk shows and writes in magazine articles that she is the only artist out there who can get truly accurate likenesses from witnesses.
I feel this would not, in itself, be so bad, except that she then advises all law enforcement agencies not to use what she refers to as police artists, because she insists that other sketch artists “contaminate” witness memory with such devices as the FBI Facial Identification Catalogue.
But despite her high visibility I am certain her claims are not backed up by scientific fact.
I believe such claims are immensely damaging, not just to the entire field of forensic art, but to every other forensic artist who is struggling to break down barriers and put out all these silly little myth-fires that keep popping up.
The bottom line is this: There are thousands of talented artists out there who can learn compositry and who can do it dependably and affordably for all sorts of law enforcement agencies or even freelancing for the families of victims—and who will do it with no media attention.
Now, on to the truth about visual aids.
I’m going to show exactly why I believe the use of visual aids is so important, why they DO NOT contaminate ANYTHING and I’ll back it up, not just by my own more than 3,000 sketches and almost 1,000 “hits,” but by hard science.
First, yes, you can definitely do a composite sketch without the use of visual aids. I did it for the first four years of my career, before attending the FBI Academy. But there are a number of cases where it is virtually impossible to do a sketch without some kind of visual aid—such as in cases where victims are so badly injured that they cannot speak, cases in which there is a language barrier, or cases that involve very young children whose language skills are not yet fully developed.
In order to understand why I believe the use of visual aids is better than not using them, it is necessary to understand a little about how the human brain works.
When we see, say, an attacker’s face, that image is recorded in the part of the brain known as the visual cortex.
In order for us to come up with the language necessary to describe a face that we saw, we have to use a different part of the brain, known as the angular gyrus, which transforms the visual image into a sound pattern, which is then sent by the brain to yet a third part, called the Wernicke’s area.
Our brains aren’t through at that point, though.
In order for us to take that language and then speak it out loud, all of this information then needs to be transmitted to yet another part of the brain, known as Broca’s area, which issues instructions for the necessary muscle movements needed to create speech.
After that, the part of the brain known as the motor cortex orders the muscles of the speech organs to move and alerts the cerebellum to coordinate their movement.
That is, if the correct words are even known. With young children, for instance, or people who’ve suffered head injuries or other incapacitating wounds, the description may not be available for all these various brain transactions to take place, which means that, without visual aids, they would be incapable of working with a forensic artist.
But if, say, we are healthy and we try to provide a usable description without visual aids, I can attest from experience that it can take hours and is an exhausting process for both the crime victim and the artist.
On the other hand, when we are shown a picture similar to what we actually saw, we receive that information in the same part of the brain as when we saw the attacker’s face—the visual cortex!
As I demonstrated in the chapter titled, “Some People Just Need Killin’,” in which police officer Paul Deason had been shot, run over and dragged down the street and was in Intensive Care when I did the sketch—all the witness had to do was simply point out facial features depicted in the visual aid and in no time at all I could get a remarkable likeness.
Still, if that explanation doesn’t convince you, then I challenge you to try to describe someone’s face without having anything to look at. You could probably come up with hundreds of ways to say “nose.”
And if you were giving this description to an artist and trying to help him or her get the drawing right, it would be a trial-and-error process that could take hours.
For victims already traumatized and exhausted by their ordeal, such a process would be absolutely draining. It could even take several days if the witness has to take time off from work for the sketch session.
Meanwhile, law enforcement has to hop around on one foot so to speak, waiting for the artist to hurry up and produce something they can use, while all along, the perpetrator may be getting further away!
All this stress is just not necessary.
For a witness to point out a photo that has a similar feature to the face being described is a much more rapid and accurate method of describing that feature to the artist.
If you do not have access to an FBI Identification Catalogue, there are others aids you can use. I will discuss these later.
USE VISUAL AIDS. Period.
Now for the last basic rule of compositry.
3) Be able and skilled and willing to modify the sketch at the witness’s direction.
Artists are used to working in solitude and drawing or painting whatever they darn well want or at least whatever the market demands, if they’re trying to make a living at it. But a forensic artist is there at the witness’s discretion. It’s our job to get it right.
I compare it to a professional writer, who must do revisions in order to please an editor before their words can see print. Sometimes they have to go back over something they’ve written and rewrite it dozens of times. This is something they can expect and are willing to do in order to get the piece as good as it can be.
So when a witness wants you to make changes to your sketch, it is absolutely to be expected. It shouldn’t hurt your feelings or leave you miffed. You’re not there to create a grand work of art. You’re there to catch a bad guy. So you must be willing to make any changes they request.
Again, I must emphasize that when you use visual aids, the chances are good that you will not be asked to make nearly as many changes as when you do not.
Later, I’ll get into some specifics on quick and easy ways to make those changes to your composites. And trust me, the more practice you get, the fewer changes you’ll be asked to make.
This next part is divided into two sections:
1) The basics of composite sketching
2) The interview
The basics of the actual artwork can be learned anywhere and are, in any event, highly personal to each artist. I am assuming that if you are interested in forensic art, then you already know not only how to draw, but have sketched or painted lots of people’s faces. There are, however, certain dos and don’ts particular to this specific art form that need to be addressed.
For instance, different artists often use different mediums in this field. I like to use pastels, but another artist might call me crazy and say they can’t work without their graphite pencils. The main point I’d like to emphasize concerning the basics is that you should do whatever makes you most comfortable, because forensic sketching is stressful enough without someone trying to force you to use a medium with which you are not comfortable.
Secondly, an entire section needs to be devoted to the interview. The interview is the single most important aspect of the forensic sketch and the tips I’m going to give you here are not taught any other place of which I am aware.
First, though, let’s hit the basics.
The basics of forensic compositry.
1) The medium.
As I said before, it’s important that you pick a medium with which you are most comfortable.
Almost every other forensic artist I know uses graphite pencil. In the past those graphite pencil drawings didn’t photocopy very well, but today the most basic copy machines have such good duplication capabilities that the copy can
come out looking like a photograph of the original. So if you like to use graphite pencils, use them.
Many experienced and successful forensic artists add charcoal to the finished sketch to enhance the darks and shadows—but I would not recommend this technique to a beginner, since complete erasure is so difficult, if not impossible. Some artists also like to add a dot of white paint or even office correction fluid for the dot or shine in the eyes or for shiny highlights on cheeks and other facial high points.
The only reason I like to use pastels is that I sketched thousands of pastel portraits of live tourists/patrons when I worked along the River Walk in San Antonio and later, at shopping malls and other venues, so I feel very comfortable with this medium.
If you have a great facility with pastels, they can save you time, since you can lay the pastel on its side and stroke in large areas in a few seconds. Pastels blend easily to depict smooth flesh and if you need, say, a wet-eyeball shine—you can apply it quickly with a stick of white.
Also, pastels often give a nice three-dimensional aspect to the sketch.
If you’re using graphite pencil now, but would like to transition into pastels, one of the best ways to do it is to start with pastel pencils in various shades of gray. These would be pencils that have a “lead” made of a hard chalk-like stick. You can use these pastel pencils for details of eyes, lips, noses and so on and then switch to larger sticks of pastel for features such as hair.
With practice, you’ll eventually find that you’re learning to control the sticks of pastel as well as the pencil pastels and can switch over then.
But again, stress yourself as little as possible and use whatever medium makes you comfortable.
2) The eraser.
Though many artists like them, I recommend not using a kneaded eraser, because that kind of eraser quickly absorbs body oils. Then, when it becomes necessary to make one of those changes we were talking about earlier, the body oils inhibit or make uneven any further application of pigment or other erasures.
In other words, it tends to smear and make a mess.
In my experience, the best eraser is the plain old white plastic kind.