"You're a Hipster, Harry" (D)

Credit for the title goes to @obasistudios

When it's Harry's birthday you draw hipster Harry in his hip Hogwarts uniform.  I can't not keep coming back to this design, he's just so cool.

Potters In Winter (D)

We're currently obsessed with The Greatest Showman, but until those inevitable arts come along...

Today we went to this Christmas In the Wizarding World pop-up merchandise attraction at the mall and it was pretty cool. This is a sketch from almost ten years ago that I tidied up, added some textures and shadows and highlights and the snow effect I always wished it had and now it looks like I imagined it when I first drew it. Magic indeed.

Original from my first reading of HPatDH in 2008:

Happy Hipster Birthday, Hipster Harry (D)

Revisiting last summer's Hipster Harry for his special day. This expression and attitude actually reflect my feelings toward JKR these days pretty accurately.

And now I realize I never actually posted my last Hipster Harry painting inspired by attending the Yule Ball last Christmas, so here it is:

Fresh Figure Drawings for December 2016 (D)

A pretty varied set for this month.

Ref: figurosity.com

Ref: Instagram @bendahlhausofficial

Sketch version for fun

Inspired by a pending evening at the Yule Ball

Santa-inspired without reference (obvious?) with a touch of While You Were Sleeping

I was a little loose with my definition of figure drawings this time around, which was fun for a change.

19 Years [Or So] Later... (D)

I recently read the latest Harry Potter "story" (no comment) but whatever the case may be, it prompted me to finally draw some of these second generation people.

Oh, the angst.

Potters

Weasleys

Malfoys

They were fun, and anyway at least they're canon.

Hipster Harry (D)

We recently played a game of Drawful with a bunch of family and my avatar kind of looked like Harry with a nice big undercut so I thought this idea needed further fleshing out.  What have I done?

 Then of course I had to explore this tragically hip/hiply tragic vessel of wizard angst a little more.  I'm way more into this design than I should be.

 Then I decided Ginny needed a slight redesign to match the new and unspeakably ironic Harry.  Plus it's been too long since I've drawn these two.

Art vs Artist 2016 (D)

Instagram meme!  I just thought, oh all right then. I tried really hard not to overthink this.

Monthly Pencils

At the start of the year I made a goal to draw a pencil portrait each month.  Nothing fancy, just something quick to practice my skillz.  I'm glad I've followed through because besides this project I have had the BIGGEST art block in the world and these are basically all I've drawn all year.  Lame. O.o 

Anyway, here is where I'm at so far:

January was Katniss.  I have to make an effort to draw the ladies.  I like how this one turned out, especially since it's a more quirky angle of her face.

In February I returned to Harry Potter fanarts with Sirius.  I still don't think the resemblance is quite there, but I like how this one turned out.  I wasn't so sure in the middle of it, but yeah.  High fives, Sirius.

In March it was Obi Wan's turn.  I think my brother asked me to draw this picture about ten years ago.  Better late than never?

Starbuck popped up in April (or maybe the start of May...).  For how much I love Battlestar, I draw it very little.  I also kind of phoned in her uniform.  All those lines!  Wahhh.

For May I've been working on something BIG!  Literally big because it's on three separate pages right now and there will be a fourth before I'm done.  More on that to come!

Art Trade: Kitties in Clothes and Sad Pandas

Today we present an art trade!

One day we were watching Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and when Mrs. Weasley uttered that immortal line (responding to Ginny's question as to where her jumper was), "Yes, dear, it was on the cat!", we as usual wondered what it could mean...  Was the cat actually wearing Ginny's jumper?  Was the cat lying underneath it?  And since when do the Weasleys have a cat anyway??  Or was her jumper sitting on some other object known to the family as "the cat"?  In any case, I told J she should illustrate what was going on there, and this is what she came up with:

It's so happy and dancing!  And what a fashionable jumper.  The animation was an afterthought, but a stroke of genius.

And then one day J was feeling a little blue, and said she felt like a sad panda, and then she asked me to illustrate that.  And I did!  And it looks like this:

Poor sad panda.

Sometimes it's nice to give each other ideas for interesting and unusual arts.

P.S.  Here's a tiny and pixelish version of the Weasley kitty:

Potter P.S. (D)

One more thing...

This is just another little piece I did intermittently while I was working on the last montages I posted.  It started with Luna (I just love her so much in the movies), and then Ginny and Neville naturally followed.  I thought it was a nice companion piece to the previous post.

That Other Trio

I love these kids!

Potter Through the Years: A Retrospective (D)

It's Harry's birthday!  To celebrate, we wore Potter shirts, had Full English Breakfast for dinner, watched a few Olympic events from London, ate cake and watched the final installment of our epic week-long HP moviethon.  That is a lot of minutes spent watching movies, but we enjoyed them all very much as always.  I decided to do a daily drawing of each of the trio during every movie to show them through the years, which would then be ready to post on 31 July.  It was kind of a challenge to age them just a year each time, but it was fun, and I really like how a lot (not quite all) of them turned out.  For all the times I've drawn these kids, I was surprised that there were a few variations among these that I had never done (like Kitty Hermione and Chess-Lovin' or Love-Struck Ron, and maybe even Prophecy Harry).

The Boy Who Lived!

Weasley Is Our King!

The Cleverest Witch of Her Age!

Seven magical years!  Splendid.  Happy birthday, Harry!  (You too, JK.)

Hogwarts Peeps (J)

Lately I have been feeling an absence of Harry Potter in my life.  Next year I'm going to read all the books through again but in the meantime I did some arts to fill the void.  Earlier this year I started playing around with this method of coloring and I gave it another whirl this time.  It all took a lot longer than I anticipated, but in the end I like how they turned out.  Ginny is probably my favorite, and I did her first, go figure.

Hopefully they are all pretty self explanatory but just for the record it goes, t-b/l-r: Ginny, Luna, Neville; Hermione, Harry, Ron; Goyle, Draco, Crabbe. 


Now to work on something with fewer people.

All the Hogwarts Ladies

A while ago, for whatever reason, I decided to draw a bunch of the girls from Harry Potter. When I'm reading the books I always picture them in uniforms like the movies, but I get a little bored drawing that same uniform on everyone. So I like to shake things up a bit, just for the sake of my own interest.

I posted them all individually on deviantart (Lavender, Hermione, Cho, Pansy, Ginny, Luna but here is the complete set. Lavender was a last minute addition, and she wound up being one of my favorites of the bunch.

(click to enlarge)

Happy Birthday, Harry!

There's been a lot of Potter-related excitement in the Pen and Pencil household this summer, what with the final film being released (which we loved!), so there's understandably been a fair amount of Potter-related artwork done as well.  Some of it hasn't been worth posting, but yesterday to celebrate Harry's birthday, I thought I would try to do something that could be posted here.  (This doubles as a Sunday Sketches post, I should say.)  I have done drawings celebrating Harry's birthdays in past years, usually of Harry gleefully looking at a cake that Ron and Hermione have prepared for him, but this year I wanted to do something a little different, inspired by something Hermione said in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1.  I was just a little disappointed that we didn't get to see Harry's birthday in the movie, but at least Hermione made reference to it.  And here you can see her and Ginny making their festive plans:

"We prepared a cake!"

I bet it was quite delicious.  Maybe they'll make another one for his 18th birthday.

And now, because a Harry post wouldn't be complete without a picture of Harry, here's a quick sketch I did a couple weeks ago inspired by the penultimate scene in the last film.  Big decision you had to make there, Harry.  Well done.  Though you might have fixed your wand or repaired some of the castle first... Just sayin'. (Though I guess the wands of the survivors could probably handle a good deal of the repairs, except of course Filch's...  lousy Squib.  Ha.)

The Boy Who Lived Becomes a Man

Everyone's a wizard! (Even Ron)

In honor of the fact that we are leaving in the morn for Disneyworld and Harry Potter land, here are some recent HP fanarts of mine. I like to do little batches of characters and call them HPeeps (for Harry Potter Peeps). This is a group of the prior generation--Remus Lupin, Lily Potter, Sirius Black, Peter Pettigrew, James Potter and Severus Snape.
A bonus of doing these periodic HPeeps fanarts is that I can look at the previous ones and see improvement in myself. Here's the first one and the second. A new high, yes? The next grouping will be a jump into the future and hopefully it will look better than ever!

Comments? Construction criticism? Questions? Outright flattery? All are welcome and encouraged!

Hogwarts Kids for Christmas

Occasionally we do commissioned artwork or requests.  A very good friend wanted drawings of her kids as Hogwarts students for last Christmas, and we couldn't possibly refuse, since 1) she's a very good friend, as I said, and 2) we obviously just love Harry Potter.  In this case we traded services rather than moneys (see the photo to the right under "About Pen and Pencil").  I did the sketches and some of the digital coloring, then passed them on to J to finesse the shading and highlights, do some  detail stuff and work on the composition and backgrounds.

Lily first wanted to be Gryffindor but later fancied herself a Ravenclaw.  Easy peasy.

Holden makes a fine Slytherin.  It's all in the gleam in his eyes.

We tried a few different ideas with the backgrounds, but in the end a parchment style was requested, the better to fit the theming and framing.  We haven't seen them fully framed and matted, but we have heard they were a big hit on Christmas morning.

Harry 2010

In the excitement leading up to the release of the latest Harry Potter movie, and during some down time during the workday, I decided to brush up on some Photoshop skills and work with layers and gradients and such.  It had been a while since I drew Mr. Potter, and I wanted to try some different ideas with color and mood, so I made a very blue and very angsty (and slightly older) Harry, hopefully evoking some of the overwhelming despair that permeates throughout the final chapter of the series.

Harry 2010, Digital Art

A Princess

With the holidays and things being so busy, I haven't had much time for arts of late. So instead of posting about something new, I thought I'd go back to something of mine that is still fairly recent. (Hopefully I'll be starting something new quite soon...I have several things in my queue.)

Anyway, so I'm a member of deviant art and I'm a member of a few groups there, primarily Harry Potter groups. They have contests and things, and it's just a way to see what lots of people are coming up with. I don't generally participate, but when there was a contest to depict your original Hogwarts characters, I couldn't resist.

This is Fantasia Hyacinth Orchidius Splendiferousness, Princess of Flim Flammery Land. Her friends call her Roxanne.

Okay, I readily admit that I was poking fun at the fangirl propensity to give OCs the most ridiculous names (along with equally ridiculous personality traits and histories). I just couldn't resist. Mr. G. and I did come up with some, shall we say, colorful characters for her to interact with, and they'll be popping up here at some point in the future.

Anyway, everytime I look at this I'm pleased because it just looks so FINISHED. Of course there are always things that can be poked at and adjusted, but on the whole it looks exactly how I want, especially the coloring. If I can ever come across such a giant stack of giant books, you can be sure I will sit right down on them and wait for someone to take my picture.

(Hurrah, my first post here! Seriously, we have been talking about doing this for MONTHS.)