Here’s an illustration of a police officer in uniform. This is the last illustration for the set of images depicting people in recognizable professions. This was made as part of a larger commission for the children’s educational publisher Learning A-Z.

One detail when drawing police for the children’s market is that you want to be careful about depicting guns. This might sound like a silly concern to have, but children’s publishing tends to be very sensitive about showing weapons. Particularly for the younger age ranges. Normally you just wouldn’t draw guns at all, but police in America are pretty much always armed. It would be weird to show them with an empty belt. It just wouldn’t quite look like a cop. But you also don’t want to show the weapon too blatantly for your audience. To solve this problem, I like to draw police officers turned slightly away from the viewer so that their hip holster is on the far side, either partially or completely hidden from view. In this case, she’s facing the viewer almost full-on, but her hand position obscures those blocky items on her belt. Undoubtedly one of those is her firearm, but it’s not too obvious.