dW

Expecto Patronum

For quite some time now (well ever since I read the first book) I’ve wanted to do some sort of Harry Potter illustration. Especially after the movies and their vagrant attempts to rewrite the books more than necessary to translate each volume to film I’ve wanted to do something that is more accurate to Jo’s descriptions in the book. This is the result of about a month’s work and quite a bit of research which included listening to each of the books while working.

This doesn’t illustrate any scene in the books. To any Harry Potter fan what is going on is quite obvious. The illustration consists of Harry, Ron, and Hermione battling dementors with their patronuses which are a stag, Jack Russell terrier, and an otter respectively. I couldn’t think of a scene from the books where the three were together, over 13 years of age, casting some cool spells, and without any other main characters around them. Naturally it had to be obvious as well what was going on. It probably portrays each of the characters as 16 year olds. They could pass for seventeen (and Hermione probably is by that point), but from much of the descriptions in the last book they weren’t at times even wearing robes at all. Their school uniform matches the plain black robes with no embellishments worn by students at Hogwarts as described in the books. At times the robes are described as being pulled over the head, so I made them appear as if the only way to put them on is to put it on over your head like a big sweater or something.

In the movies they decided to stray differently than how Rowling describes the wands. Each of their wands should appear to be the correct length, but due to the lighting only a bit of Hermione’s could be spotted. They’re smooth, cyllindrical sticks of wood with a bit of engraving and craftsmanship to them.

Ron is quite a bit taller than Harry with a longer nose and freckles, but in this lighting and angle it’s hard to denote how long his nose is or see much of the freckles I painted on there; they’re there. Hermione is shorter than both of them with the typical bushy hair. Oddly enough after drawing them each one of them resembles their movie actor counterparts in some way or another, especially Ron. I’d like to say that was intentional, but it wasn’t at all.

The image is dark, blue, and misty due to the description of the dementors’ magical abilities to turn the sky completely dark, generate immense cold, and generate a cold low-lying mist. Blue seemed to be a natural color for it. The ratio of the image is quite horizontal simply because I wanted an image I could stretch across my two monitors. No real deep thought went into choosing the dimensions. The image up top is a hyperlink to the image’s page on Flickr. Larger sizes are viewable from there. Well, I could talk about it some more, but I think I’m tired of writing this post. I’ll stop here for today.