Harry Potter

The Harry Potter stories hold a very special place in my heart. After I finished college, for a short time I experienced the only time in my life that art lost its appeal to me. I’d been doing art since I could hold a crayon, but suddenly I found myself in the “real world”. I needed to get a job to pay the bills and I didn’t have time for art and before I knew what happened I was barely doing art at all. And when I did, I really struggled to find anything I even wanted to draw or paint. At the risk of being overly dramatic, I felt like life had squelched out the artist God put in me.

Until I read the Harry Potter books.

Those stories woke up my imagination in ways I can barely describe and I totally bonded with them. As I read the books my mind filled with images to the point I had to get them out on paper or I felt I would burst. So I began what I lovingly call “The Potter Project”.

The project is evolving all the time. When I started it, the project was simply one painting for each chapter and cover of all of the books. But as I was working on the first book, sometimes, one scene just wasn’t enough, so I started doing a handful of vignette drawings to make up for what was getting missed. Then, as I closed in on finishing the first book, I felt like I was still “missing” something. I thought I had done a good job at picking the scenes to illustrate, and I stood by those choices, but the chapter “Diagon Alley” was still lacking. So I did a second painting for that chapter, and it needed to be twice the size of the others for what I was doing, so I decided that would be part of the series for the other books. Then when working on the second book I made the decision that the number the book was in the series would correlate with the number of “double size” illustrations that book would get; one extra for the first book, two for the second, there would be three for the third and so on.

After finishing the illustrations for the first book it wasn’t enough for me to just have them. I wanted to see them... “in” a book. So after a little research and studying I learned how to bind my own book. I formatted everything myself on the computer and printed it on my home printer and then everything else I did by hand. There were a couple other small paintings I did for the project once I was making the physical book.

Since starting the Potter-Project, I’ve started doing some other art as well; most is in the same vein as the Potter art, but that doesn’t matter. The point is: I have a passion for making art again.

I won’t lie, it is my deepest dream that this project will turn into my career. I want to be doing this kind of art for my whole life, and if the owners of the Potter copyright ever wanted to produce illustrated editions of the books, I believe I am the best artist for the job. I think my style compliments the style of the books well, and you’ll never find anyone more passionate about seeing the project though. After all, I’m doing it for free right now!

To see the illustrations click on one of the books from the “book shelf” above.

To see a book’s Gallery, just click on it from the “book shelf” bellow