“Any given day staff at the Missing Children Division are working on 5,000 to 6,000 active missing children reports – many of these are considered long-term cases – and the work our Forensic Imaging Team does to age progress long-term missing children is invaluable to our ability in finding these children,” says Robert Lowery, vice president of the NCMEC’s Missing Children’s Division. “It’s a huge responsibility,” says McNally.Īnd one that’s essential to NCMEC’s mission. That commitment to the program is reflective of the importance McNally and others place on their profession. “These are artists with a deep connection to their subjects.”īefore the images are finalized, the forensic artists show them to the child’s parents for their approval. “We have an amazing staff who put so much of their own selves into these images,” McNally says. That process – nearly a pencil-to-paper approach – helps humanize the subjects and can keep the artists grounded in their work. “We do color corrections and a few other Photoshop tasks but the majority of our work is actual drawing and digital painting,” says McNally. McNally’s team works on drawing tablets and iMacs, using Adobe Photoshop to create and enhance their work. Once the source material is collected, the forensic artists use a high-resolution photo of the missing child as the base of their image or start from scratch. “We’ll use what we know about general growth principles – wrinkles, sagging eyelids – to age them so it can be more difficult but it’s still possible.” “We may only have one or two photos to use, maybe just of the child, so we have to work with what we have,” says McNally. In some cases, though, the source material is limited. If there are brothers or sisters, who do they look like? If there’s an aunt or uncle who looked like the child when they were young, we take that into account. Instead, we try to be as logical as possible. We don’t necessarily take all the traits from the mother or the father and incorporate them into the image.
#Girl age progression skin#
“They can help us determine what someone might look like today – the shape of the nose, the skin tone, the hairline. “Photos and videos of relatives when they were the current age of the missing child are really helpful,” McNally says.