Harry Potter Nesting Dolls
Harry Potter nesting dolls! Three years in the making, I started painting these around the same time I started working on Rumours From Elsewhere in 2017. Unfortunately making a game was pretty stressful and time-consuming so this set sat half-painted on my shelf for three years, with an occasional day of painting, until I finally completed the set at the end of 2020.
The designs are from JK Rowling's Harry Potter series (duh!). I was lucky enough to grow up at a time when the Harry Potter sequels were still a work-in-progress, which meant a year or two wait between each book. It was pretty exciting each time a new book was released! Although I really enjoyed reading the books as a kid, I haven't really kept up with all of the films and spin-offs. This set was based off the early UK book cover designs (especially Dumbledore's colourful cloak).
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My favourite doll in this set is Dumbledore, I am really pleased with how bright and detailed his cloak looks, as most of the characters are wizard students there were a lot of dark uniforms in this set. I think Snape turned out especially terrifying! I had initially planned to add Hagrid's three-headed dog to the back of his design but I found that adding a brown dog to a brown cloak wasn't very visually interesting, so I went with a dragon based on a Hungarian Horntail from the 4th book in the series - The Goblet of Fire. Hagrid doesn't look very friendly, however in the first book he is described as looking threatening so it's all canon :)
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| My designs for the Dumbledore, Malfoy and Voldemort dolls |
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| Hagrid design |
Above is my initial design for the Hagrid doll, my process involves making a pencil sketch and then scanning it and colouring the design using Photoshop. I use these designs as a reference whilst painting the actual dolls. The design process is actually the most time-consuming as it's hard to narrow down my ideas to one doll design and to pick which characters to use - I had wanted to include Professor McGonagall, Dobby, Neville... but the set only had 8 dolls! You can see that I altered the initial Hagrid doll design by changing the back - I felt that the back was a bit bland so I added a fire-breathing dragon as is common for this type of situation. Looking back, I feel I could have added a pink umbrella to the design as well.
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| Snape, Harry Potter, Hermione and Ron designs |
You can see I also added extra items to Snape's design as the doll was very dark, so I added some colourful potions and ingredients like the jar of eyeballs. I also added a broom and snitch to Harry's design. In my original designs I had toyed with the idea of making Dumbledore the smallest doll, but I decided that I liked his design too much as it was bright and colourful, so I made him larger.
I have some more ideas for possible Harry Potter nesting dolls sets that I would like to make in the future featuring different characters. I'd also like to push myself a bit further to included more narrative elements. Let me know if you would like me to do another Harry Potter set! I have so many ideas for different nesting doll sets, it's difficult to decide which one to do next, especially as I always seem to end up spending (literal) years on them.
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