Behind The Scenes: Harry Potter Illustration (Patreon)

With this week's project, there is not much to talk about in terms of inspiration. After all, it's a part of the Hogwarts interior series I started recently. So there is plenty of inspiration available already.

But I still get a lot of questions about how I approach scene like this. Some of you tried to recreate iconic scenes from the movies and failed. And from what I saw so far, often it's about picking the right composition, layout and objects.

So what can you do to try better next time?

As always, the best way to start is to create a board either on Pinterest, or use reference software like PureRef and get as much material as possible. All the possible angles of the scene, even if it looks like you won't need it at that point.

Visit the full Pinboard here

Often, when in the middle of the project, you will find useful objects in close-up scenes like that. And there is one other reason, why get multiple shots of sometimes even the same thing.

Lighting and colors. The more reference you have at hand, the more material you can compare in terms of lighting. What makes that particular scene great? Is it a daylight? Or does it look better at night times. All of these are small cues, that can help you build better result.

And at the same time filter out those, that wouldn't work. If you have different shots of the same setup, you can already see what lighting style not to use. And that's a lot of saved time you'd spend experimenting.

Ok, so you have your scene, lots of references and mood shots to know what to go for. What is the last missing piece?

Composition and layout of course. If you're not replicating the same camera angle in perspective, and want to create a stylized version of the space, you need to get creative here. What I recommend to do here, is to go and pick key elements from the reference shots. Just take a paper or what have you, and mark it down.

To make this recognizable and iconic, I needed the small staircase with balcony and elevated door, with part of the rounded tower peeking out of the wall. I liked the daylight version of the room, so I wanted to include the large window as well and of course, some student's tables and board.

With all of this marked down, it was time to sketch and make sense of it. Of course, none of it would fit into a square open room with only two walls available. And that's a good thing. You get to be creative here. Try to combine these elements in a way that works, regardless of the original. If you compare it to the reference. you will see that with the window on the left, the staircase and balcony is mirrored.

And there is one other important thing to mention, and that's scale. Don't just go into it and try to recreate the scale from the reference. You would probably end up with a lot of small objects, stretched architecture and it just looks grotesque in isometric open room like this. Try to take that essence you marked down, and only include what's necessary. There is a lot of student's tables in the reference shots, but I only needed two. They are positioned on the open edge of the room, so that suggests they go on in rows. And also scale of the objects themselves. Don't be afraid to make some gaps smaller and some objects closer together.

To sum it up, do your reference homework, make a list of key elements, get creative with layout and scale and fall back to reference for lighting and color moods and you should achieve much better results.

You can watch the process video on Youtube