Her composite drawings of criminals have led to arrests throughout Mid-Michigan for five years, but before she became a forensic artist, Heather Johnson had never sketched a human face.

"I took art all through high school, but then after high school ... I just kind of doodled," Johnson said. "I never actually drew a person before, until I started this."

An MSU alumna and DNA lab technician for the Michigan State Police, Johnson is also one of six forensic artists in the statewide agency. Johnson works with Forensic Science Division Headquarters and Lansing Laboratory on Canal Road in Lansing.

Forensic art includes composite drawings of criminals based on witness descriptions, age-progression drawings of fugitives and missing people, 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional skull reconstruction and postmortem drawings.

Skull reconstruction involves creating a drawing or sculpture from an unidentified skull. Postmortem drawings are of unidentified and sometimes decayed bodies.

Most of Johnson's work as a forensic artist is with composite drawings of criminals, and she is always on call for police departments throughout the state.

Johnson trained for about a year to become a forensic artist and now trains other interested forensic scientists.

It usually takes Johnson about two hours to interview the victim or witness and make the composite drawing.

The artists ask witnesses about basic details and have them choose certain features, such as the shape of the face and nose from a book of photos.

"After they show me which mug shot looks similar to whatever feature I'm on at that point, I'll draw the feature and then I'll show it to them," Johnson said, adding that many people remember more than they expected.

"You hear a lot, 'Oh my gosh, I can't believe a drawing could actually look like somebody.'"

There have been a few instances in which Johnson learned her drawing helped catch a criminal, but agencies usually do not keep her updated on the cases, she said.

"They're just happy that they get the person, that they don't keep up with calling us," Johnson said. "We're just another tool."

But she feels great when her drawings do lead to an arrest.

"It makes you feel good because agencies will see it's a good tool - they know that it actually works," she said.

Johnson has also done a skull-reconstruction drawing, a postmortem drawing of unidentified human remains and a few age-progression drawings of Michigan's most-wanted fugitives.

The Michigan State Police recently added age-progressed drawings of fugitives to its Web site, Detective Sgt. Mark Krebs said.

"Many of these suspects have been missing for a number of years, and we believe they're still out and about," he said. "All we had was an old photograph of them, maybe a mug shot of them from 10 years ago.

"We thought it'd be a good idea to show what we thought they might look like today, in the hopes that somebody would see this and say, 'Hey, I know who this is.'"

The Michigan State Police's forensic art program is one of the best in the country, Krebs said.

The agency has six artists and an additional two in training who work together to provide free composite drawings for any felony cases in the state. They are always on call and sometimes have to travel across the state.

The East Lansing Police Department has an officer on its staff who composites drawings, Deputy police Chief Tom Wibert said.

"It depends on the witness and how accurate their memory is, but a lot of times the quality of the composition drawing ends up being a pretty shocking likeness of the person we're looking for when we finally catch up with them," he said.

Since Johnson also does age-progression drawings, she said she has received requests to make age-progression drawings of people's children and other interests unrelated to crime.

"They don't think I do anything else but draw," she said.

Johnson spends most of her days working as a DNA technician at the state police lab - not drawing faces.

And Johnson said her job is not like some might expect it to be from watching Hollywood versions of crime investigations.

"It's not a cake walk," she said.

Melissa Domsic can be reached at domsicme@msu.edu.