Heather Shoemaker Wyoming: Legal Doodling

Heather Shoemaker of Wyoming is a Cheyenne attorney who specializes in civil rights and criminal law. She practices out of an office in the downtown area.

Heather Shoemaker of Wyoming is also a skilled artist. She has had some instruction during her life but for the most part is self-taught. Heather Shoemaker is good enough to have had many of her drawings displayed in a local gallery, including a show that she called "Legal Doodling."

"It really was just a lot of doodles, but the gallery owner really liked them," she says. Heather Shoemaker says that she is a compulsive doodler. "When I'm on the phone, when I'm interviewing a client, and especially when I'm in court," she says with a laugh. And with the help of a curator at the Flat Mountain Gallery on Front Street, she selected fifty sketches for "Legal Doodling." The framed collection, several of which have already been sold, opened in early 2014.

And sure enough, each of the sketches is on paper from an 8x14 inch yellow legal pad. A few of them were done in black ink, but most of the sketches are in an ordinary #2 pencil. "That's the same as an HB pencil," she says, naming a medium hard, common sketch pencil.

The drawings in "Legal Doodling" range from simple sketches to more complex drawings that feature a lot of detail, including extensive shading achieved through a technique called cross-hatching. "Those were slow days in court," laughs Heather Shoemaker of Wyoming. There are portraits of judges and jurors, opposing counsel, and court officials like bailiffs. 

There are no sketches of defendants, however. She has sketches numerous defendants – she says she sketches just about everything, and almost always has a pocket sized sketchbook with her – but felt it would be wrong to include them in "Legal Doodling."