To celebrate Harry Potter’s birthday today, I’m posting a drawing I created several years ago. They’re portraits of characters in the series: Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, Albus Dumbledore, Professor McGonagall, Professor Severus Snape, and Lord Voldemort.
With each portrait, I tried to draw in an uninterrupted line. I was inspired to try this style after I saw an exhibit of Alexander Calder’s portraits that he created out of wire. The exhibit, at the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibit Calder’s Portraits: A New Language. Calder was a wonderfully creative spirit: inventing mobiles, forming lively stabiles, and painting bright, colorful works. He also created portraits with wire that loops and twists to form features of his friends and celebrities–a diverse range from Babe Ruth to Jean-Paul Sartre to Jimmy Durante.