Forensic Art Workshops Available for Institutes of Higher Learning

ONE AND TWO-DAY WORKSHOPS FOR ART EDUCATORS:

• These workshops will give art education professionals, psychology, and Criminal Justice educators the ability to instruct students in the highly specialized field of forensic art. Lois Gibson, in combination with her textbook Forensic Art Essentials, will impart to your faculty the tools needed to take artistically gifted students who possess the right temperament, and give them the basics to enter this new profession.
• Lois Gibson will impart to your faculty more than a hundred hours of exercises, lesson plans, and drawing practices that replicate work done by a real forensic artist which students can perform. The material conveyed can be incorporated into several semesters’ lesson plans.

SUBJECTS SURVEYED

1. Sketching perpetrators’ faces from witness memory
2. Over view of facial reconstruction from a skull
3. Age progression portraits
4. Postmortem reconstructions
5. Surveillance photo enhancement/comparison with mug shots
6. Get-away vehicles, tattoos, sexual differences
7. Integrating forensic art into law enforcement agencies

One day workshop covers subjects 1, 2, and 3. Two day workshop covers all subjects.

Since there are only 19 full-time forensic artists employed full-time in the entire nation, the field is wide open. Most cities and states have no forensic artist available full-time, yet Hollywood depicts the country as having a sketch artist working in every department. Your institution can bridge the gap between reality and the public need/expectation to have a forensic artist available to help innocent victims get justice.

Lois Gibson teaches forensic art at Northwestern University Center for Public Safety (2000 to present). As the Guinness Book of Records World’s most successful forensic artist, her drawings have helped bring in more than 1,266 perpetrators. Students come from all over the world to take her class; many solve the first case upon which they work. She has taught her profession all over the country and will soon be traveling to Romania to instruct forensic artists in Eastern Europe.

Lois Gibson has a Bachelor of Fine Arts With Honors from The University of Texas at Austin after matriculating at Kansas University, Wichita State University, Kansas Wesleyan University, University of Texas at Arlington, and The University of Texas Health-Science Center at San Antonio, Dental School. She completed the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Forensic Artist Course and has taken and given training at International Association for Identification Educational Conferences for 17 years. She has been the forensic artist for the Houston Texas Police Department and all the surrounding law enforcement agencies for 29 years. (Curriculum Vitae available upon request)