Behind the Scenes: Hogwarts Express

As the fall peaks and holiday season approaches, I like to go and re-watch some of the feel-good movie or TV series. And the ultimate holiday feel good series for me is the Harry Potter series. And as the family watches the movies, a lot of times inspiration starts to flow and I start to think about how would I re-create this or that scene.

This of course happened several times already so I have a handful of illustrations, that I already created with the HP theme. But there are always some more ideas to explore. And some, that might be hiding in plain sight.

See, I was always looking for the next building to make, or a room to build. But watching the wizard students riding the famous Hogwarts Express, I started to think. Is there any difference between the room and train compartment? 

There are always things like this, invisible at first, but pretty obvious when you say it out loud. If I can cut out a part of a building, I can cut out a part of a train wagon.

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I went and searched for anything connected to Hogwarts Express. It's a bit difficult to find movie scenes online and also, they not always necessarily provide what you need. Taken the fact, that the HP is a book series in the first place, there is a lot of wiggle room left for your fantasy.

So this time I focused more on illustrated content. Seeing how other authors approached these scenes, I could let my own imagination fly too and come up with more unique result.

When sketching the layout, I had to determine, how much of the carriage compartment will actually be visible. When I started with the idea, I imagined a whole compartment with facing seats, but as I sketched out the first draft, it was obvious, that the scope would be too large. I really wanted the window to be quite dominant, so I made the decision to cut the scope even more and zoom in only on one set of seats with the table next to window.

This created an empty corner on the other side, so I thought it would be a nice place to put the Hedwig's (Harry's snow owl) cage. I went over the references few times over and picked additional details for the scene, like the wizard cards, beans of all flavors and other wizard stuff.

One of the illustrations had this very distinct bedroom style lamp, so I thought it would be just perfect to hang it next to the window. It's exactly the type of things you see in the Wizarding World environments.

You can watch the process video on Youtube.