rouched behind a rock for cover, in their going-straight role as payroll guards, Sundance told Butch: “You take the two on the left and I’ll take the two on the right.” On a busy day in criminal court, you’ll hear the same words spoken between the mother-daughter courtroom-artist team of Shirley and Andrea Shepard. With as little as three minutes to capture the essence of an arraignment, the Shepards are the quickest draws in the East.

It’s an unusual line of work that lies somewhere between the art world and the news business. Courtroom artists’ work provides the public with a peek into the environment of cops, judges and lawyers that most people would not otherwise get a chance to see — not to mention illustrative looks at a celebrity defendants, murderers and the occasional terrorist.

In murder cases, mother Shirley explains, the victims’ families have very definite ideas about what the face of evil should look like: “They want you put horns on their heads, but we don’t always see that,” she says.

“We see two eyes and a nose that we have to draw,” says Andrea, finishing her mother’s sentence.

In other words, the court artist’s mission is to produce an accurate representation of what occurred in the courtroom under very difficult circumstances. “We try to get realism,” says Shirley...“and accuracy,” adds Andrea. Their sketches attempt to capture as faithfully as possible how someone looked and acted in the courtroom context. Meeting that self-imposed goal sometimes means doing a second quick drawing because of newsworthy developments.

Shirley recalls the Sean (“Puffy”) Combs trial as a case in point. She and Andrea had completed a drawing that showed well-drawn images of Combs, the lawyers and the judge. But when the not-guilty verdict came in, Combs covered his face with his hands and rested his head on the defendant’s table.

Their news judgment told them that this was the critical moment that they had to preserve in pastel, even though it lacked Combs’ facial features. Without tipping off their idea to the other artists in the courtroom (drawings can be copyrighted but ideas can’t), they quickly completed the sketch. And that became the picture used around the world to portray the verdict in that famous case.

Below, Sean "Puffy" Combs on hearing the "not guilty" verdict in his trial.

The speed critical to this line of work sometimes takes its toll on quality. “It’s not perfect and doesn’t meet our standards,” Shirley admits, but she says it serves a genuine journalistic purpose. The Puffy picture was “really a crummy drawing, but it caught the reality.” So don’t discount their talent based on “speed drawings.” They spend their rare off-day interludes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, copying Old Masters’ brush strokes and color combinations in oils. “We’re not forging, we’re copying,” Shirley is quick to add. And copying is a time-honored artistic pursuit.

They have been artists for most of their lives. Shirley was trained at Music & Art H.S., Pratt, Cooper Union and NYU. Andrea learned her skills apprenticing with her mother and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Cappa from Barnard and obtained graduate degrees from Columbia. She also spent years doing financial analysis and worked at Bell Laboratories and AT&T. In 1991, when the “cameras-in-the-courtroom” experiment ended, WNBC-News approached the Shepards about doing courtroom art.

Their tryout debut was the Peter Gotti trial. She drew a good picture of young Peter, Shirley says, and, half expecting never to return to draw in another courtroom, she asked the subject to sign it. After conferring with his attorney Bruce Cutler, he agreed to provide the autograph. The TV station loved both the sketch and the signature, and the Shepards started their new courtroom art career. (They have had several educational exhibitions, including one at the Police Museum.)

“This is our retirement job,” Andrea says. “But there’s not much money in it,” Shirley adds. And the stress is tremendous, both agree.

They are on call 24/7/365. The phone call or beep from a news desk can come at 2 a.m., assigning them to an arraignment practically anywhere, and they have to get there on time, fight for a seat with a view, and do their best to produce a visual for a TV station or newspaper.

“It’s not unlike when, in the movies, you see cops parked in a patrol car and they dump their coffee out the window to speed off to a job,” Andrea says. “We’ve left food cooking in the oven and jumped out of the shower with soapy hair to get to a courthouse where we were needed.”

And the conditions they work under are far from ideal. Very often, in a cramped space without the benefit of an easel, desk or tabletop, they must rest drawing board and paper on a carryall-luggage handle to do their work. Often, too, their seats lack the line-of-sight necessary for a good angle on the courtroom cast. To complicate things further, they have to draw un-posed people who are often in motion. They use binoculars to get a closer look at their subjects and improve their level of detail.

And then there’s the mess.

“Pastel is a dirty medium,” says Shirley. Chunks of pastel get all over the place. Their hands are perpetually stained and the colors usually find their way to a cheek or forehead, compliments of a wayward itch or the need to brush shoulder-length hair out of artistic eyes. Both mother and daughter work in leather pants, not as a fashion statement but because pastel can been brushed off leather but stains cloth.

Daughter Andrea (left) and mother Shirley, courtroom artists.

The Shepards recently traveled to Alexandria, Va., for the trial of accused 9-11 terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui and were shocked to see that the courtroom artists were using completed pictures not executed right there and then in the courtroom. They were supplying the media outlets with file drawings straight from their portfolio of pre-drawn pictures. “Why bother going to the trial at all?” Shirley asks. “Just draw the stuff in your studio and sell it to the press.”

Deadline pressures and difficult working conditions aside, Andrea and Shirley Shepard obviously love their work. “The wonderful thing about it,” Shirley says, “is that you get to see people you would never otherwise have the opportunity to see. It’s a front-row seat in the theatre of life — and they pay us, too!”