#HTE

Unusual Illustration Jobs: What Does It Take to Be a Police Sketch Artist, and How Much Does it Pay?

When I was still in art school, I met a grad student making big bucks as a medical illustrator. I saw some of her work and it was insanely detailed and precise. In that pre-widespread-CG era, someone with her skills could make a lot of money drawing cutaways of organs.

Another unusual sketch-skill-based job is police sketch artist. And it’s almost the opposite of medical illustrator in that you needn’t get every detail right, just a few telltale elements. Because of the way that we process faces, sometimes very little in the way of rendered detail is required for a witness to say “That’s the guy.”

Here’s a case in point. The BBC reports that in Pennsylvania, an anonymous witness to a theft drew an unbelievably crude sketch of a suspect–and the police actually recognized who it was:

“While the sketch provided by the witness may have appeared amateurish and cartoonish, it, along with the distinctive physical descriptors, jogged the memory of at least one investigator to provide a potential suspect name,” Lancaster Police wrote in their report.

They then showed a mugshot to the witness, who confirmed that was the man s/he had seen.

While that sketch was drawn by a witness working from memory, consider how difficult it must be, as a police sketch artist, to draw a face based on someone’s verbal description. 

Here’s an example of how that process goes, where they must use photos of other people to prompt the witness:

The greatest challenge is that it’s difficult to describe someone’s face using language, even if that face is burned into your memory. Here’s an amusing experiment where couples are asked to describe their partners’ faces to a police sketch artist, then they see the results:

Better graphics software is probably going to wipe the profession out in the future. But for the time being, if you’re looking for a short-term gig you can reportedly make $41k a year. If you’re curious, you can learn how to become a police sketch artist here.