[aethertap]

I've been learning how to sketch recently (not for courtrooms, just for fun), but something I noticed in the process might be relevant.

When you're sketching, you have to make choices about what's important and what to leave out. That means you have to study the scene pretty closely and pick what to represent. If courtroom sketching works like that, then I could see how having a skilled observer picking out important things to represent could be beneficial. If a particular moment is especially memorable, the sketch might capture and emphasize the drama in a way that a photo wouldn't. A sketch is kind of like the executive summary of a scene, removing noise and focusing in on what seemed important at the time.

[chicob]

This is a bit like scientific illustration, where one has to portrait an archetype representing a whole species, in the form on a perfect individual that has all the important characteristics but doesn't exist and was never directly observed by the artist.