On this trip Butler has drawn a 99-year-old great grandmother who described the horrors of the great famine in 1932-33 and a seven-year-old recovering from brain surgery after being shot in the head. With a wide selection of visual approaches to reportage, there’s a great range of images to enjoy. From Anna Cattermole’s two-year record of shipbuilding to Anne Howeson’s dreamlike images of the vanishing buildings of London’s Kings Cross. Examining the images is revealing. Scale is an element of the compositions which often places the human aspect of the image into the context of its surroundings. As in Alex Nicholson’s drawing of a demonstration outside the monumental buildings around Bank in London, or the intimate space occupied by Steve Wilkin’s commuters, drawn regularly on his daily travels to work.

Absolutely, the best bit about illustration is having a commission, it’s incredibly reassuring. However, 75% of the places I go are initiated by me. While reportage often focuses on political and social situations, it pays special attention towards describing the lives, experiences and personalities of the people involved in these situations. Hence, autobiographies, biographies and group biographies have often been described as written reportage, as they also describe real-life people but with creative storytelling techniques. 2 Lucinda Rogers joins House of Illustration to discuss the practice of reportage (drawing on location directly from life) and how she uses documentary drawing as a critical medium for debate to explore the theme of a changing London. The drawings I did in Syria in 2012 were one of the few moments when I felt like I had done my job. They described a small town in northern Syria between two waves of fighting. The drawings were published in the Guardian and the Times and I felt like they did justice to the people and the story at the time. The trouble with a lot of reportage work is it's quite dense and you've got to imagine that translated to newsprint together with all the copy that goes with the story and you're not doing yourself any favours if you make it to intricate.

Following the publication of Reportage Illustration: Visual Journalism, Gary Embury and Mario Minichiello will be discussing reportage drawing at the V&A

Gary Embury. I'm interested in the role of universities to underpin this kind of journalistic inquiry within art courses. do you think we are equipping our students in terms of, ethics, data protection, and confidentiality? Do there need to be more courses specialising in this area or giving the kind of content film and journalism students would receive undertaking documentary projects. Courtroom artists are responsible for capturing the unfolding events during court proceedings. Artists play a vital role in visually reporting legal cases as photographers are not permitted. In some countries, such as the UK, artists are not allowed to draw inside the courtroom and must sketch from memory after they leave the room!

Literary reportage is a genre that presents factual real-life stories but with the storytelling techniques and stylistic conventions of fictional works. Travelling to war zones is presumably not something you fall into. How did you get into this line of work?What Liu enjoyed most about studying in the UK was the freedom to experiment. “I think the British approach to education has had a great influence on my illustrations. My teachers at BCU constantly encouraged me and helped to build my independence as a practitioner,” says the illustrator. “That was very important to me.” Gary Embury: Following a conference at The RCA in 1984 called 'The Artist as Reporter' Clive Ashwin wrote an article for Designer Magazine called 'New illustration and selective Blindness'. He wrote about Selective vision in referring to reportage drawing where human issues were strangely absent. What do the panel think about reportage drawing which doesn't really get under the fingernails of real underlying issues. Materials can be varied for reportage, with the digital proving effective for many. Jenny Soep often using a tablet to capture live music events, and Tim Vyner creating fascinating time lapse films of his drawings. And opportunities keep arising. Vyner gives a mature reflection of how reportage could develop and how technology could impact on the way visual journalism is recorded.

That’s the common denominator between all of these places, it’s the civilians who have war delivered to their homes and have the greatest cost. It shouldn’t have to be sadder [than any other war] to get in the paper,” he says. “They’re all as abhorrent and pathetic as the last one and I always feel that same sense of helplessness.” The technology may be very enabling in allowing you to do that. We had some interesting discussions at the time of the Olympics project (referring to Tims' reportage drawing project with The Times 2012) and very often these discussions did end up as moving drawings or animations. From my point of view, although the technology is very enabling, I've actually been doing the same thing pretty much for the last 20 to 25 years. The context for the delivery of that work may change but the activity itself remains my observation of a particular place and particular moment in time and the documentation of that.... 20 years previously no one ever asked me what pencil I used, so I think people were fascinated by the technology and we still are, but the activity for me very often remains the same. In the month we mark World Refugee Day, I would like to talk about reportage drawing – a type of visual journalism. Reportage drawing is drawing on location, intending to capture an observed subject. It resonates hugely with me as a former journalist and broadcast news pr for nearly 20 years, before I retrained as a portrait artist in 2010. Reportage drawing finds its roots in the wish for information. According to Gary Embury and Mario Minichiello in their book, ‘Reportage Illustration: Visual Journalism’ historically it has documented conflicts and wars, courtrooms (where cameras are not allowed to be present in the UK), news reports and investigations and social events, such as protests and concerts. In Cold Blood is a true crime reportage where Capote (1924-1984) spent six years researching the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. Capote conducted several interviews and did extensive research into the murderers, victims, investigators and other parties involved in the case.Gary Embury: Can the drawn image compete with the photo or moving image, what is the future of reportage when one considers the development of digital interactive media? In essence, they both involve sketching from life and on location. After all, the ‘urban sketching’ movement was started by Gabriel Campanario, a Seattle-based journalist who works for The Seattle Times as both a writer and an artist. He started the Urban Sketchers blog and invited other artists to become ‘correspondents’ and contribute regular journalistic sketches depicting life as it unfolds in front of them. when I'm drawing in arms fairs I'm continually baffled by how to get beneath the surface, so sometimes I draw really wildly and sometimes I decide it's the polite veneer I need to draw, and the drawings are much more restrained. I'm continually baffled, continually dissatisfied, continually on the point of wanting to destroy entire sketchbooks in frustration, and yet it's that challenge that keeps me at it. Every now and again once in a blue moon there is a drawing which does get beneath the surface, but I would say most often you do need a bit of text to give context as well. This gave birth to a long career as a cover artist, for which he won six Eisner Awards. During this period of time, his work attracted the interest of many new commercial clients in industries including advertising, music, film, and even fashion.