This morning...

As I was dozing off and on and watching the early news, a story came on about a preliminary hearing for a very public, very volatile military court martial. (I'm not going to mention which one it is, because my following little rant might be taken as detracting from, or making light of, the circumstances of the trial.)

Anyway, I woke up enough to see that they were using courtroom artist's drawings, and I was just astounded. There were about three or four images, and every single one looked like it had been drawn by a grade-schooler. They were absolutely the worst courtroom sketches I have ever seen--they looked like they were made for a Saturday Night Live routine.

Drawing from life can be hard, and harder still when the subject won't sit still, and harder still when they could get up and leave any moment, and even harder yet when you're surrounded by people watching what you draw--but good courtroom artists are able to capture with a few strokes the mood of a room, as well as accurately capture the likeness of the subject. It can even be a bit abstract and still convey the necessary information.

You would think that there would be a sufficient number of illustrators out there who could handle this trial without resorting to someone who couldn't draw the little cartoon deer from the Famous Artists School if his life depended on it.


posted by Terry at 10:07:00 AM