Fantastic Drawings and Where To Find Them: A sneak peek into Jim Kay’s ‘Harry Potter’ illustrations

A portrait of Severus Snape. (Courtesy: Bloomsbury)

A Potter fan (but of course), Kay says his favourite character — and the one he began working on first — was Hagrid, Keeper of Keys and Grounds at Hogwarts, and not the boy wizard. “I’m very fond of drawing giants; they remind adults like me what it was like to be a child again, looking up at big people. My favourite character to draw is, at the moment, Hagrid, but [Severus] Snape comes a close second,” he says. The Boy Who Lived, on the contrary, was far more difficult to master. “Harry was by far the hardest to try and conceive, I still struggle with him. The characters are partly inspired by real people, people I know, but none of them are exact representations of those who model for me. Mr Dursley is a mixture of two people, Hagrid is a composite of lots of different characters, for example. You have to stick to the text, so I follow the author’s descriptions of characters closely,” says Kay.

As the books progress, there’s a steady growth in Kay’s depiction of his characters, too. It’s difficult to pin down at first glance, but then one notices the slight change in height, the addition of a little heft, the filling out of the cheeks and the changing musculature of arms and legs. “It’s a constant struggle, because a pencil line out of place can age a child by several years. I don’t have children of my own, and so this is the first time I’ve had to really think about how people develop from youngsters into adults. It’s not how I imagined — bits seem to stretch on their own for a while, and then the rest of the body sort of catches up! It’s different for every individual, of course, but I’m always surprised when I visit my nieces how rapidly they change. I was a very, very small and skinny child for a long time, and then started growing a lot later — a bit like Harry. It’s an overused cliche, but kids do grow up fast,” says Kay.

The artist, Jim Kay: Both of Kay’s works are from the recently released illustrated version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. (Courtesy: Bloomsbury)

In some of his earlier works such as A Monster Calls and The Great War: Stories Inspired by Objects from the First World War 1914-1918, Kay’s style is on the darker side, largely relying on monochromes to capture the sombre tone of the narratives. In his visual re-telling of the Harry Potter series, Kay introduces a melange of styles — densely detailed images, such as his magnificently textured panorama of Diagon Alley or the stand-out chart on dragon eggs in the first book, or an illustration of the majestic hippogriff, Buckbeak, in the just-released volume, are off-set by wispy watercolours, dramatic chiaroscuros, cartoon-like sketches and stolid portraits. There’s a vibrancy to his work, a raw energy that pulses through the books and assumes a luminescence of its own. “I want to loosen up for the later books. The pressure has made me feel quite contained sometimes, and, I guess, detail is fun to do. But (it’s) also a safety net. It’s far harder to show spontaneous, dynamic images than careful, detailed ones, and I’d like to give future books a bit more zip and flair. Younger children seem to like the detail though, so there will always be something to pore over in each book,” he says.

This maze of details becomes most apparent when Kay turns his attention to the natural world, in particular, to animals. His personal website goes by the name creepyscrawlies.com and like his work in the pop-up book, Bugs, by entomologist George McGavin, there’s a realism to his rendition of owls, dragons and other magical creatures, and an intimacy that is born of a deep respect and love for the great outdoors. “In my lifetime, I’m seeing a catastrophic loss of biodiversity around me, which is terrifying. There are times when I feel we are sleepwalking into a less colourful future; the thought that today’s children will not hear the birdsong I did as a child, or see the butterflies I used to. Wildlife matters to me a great deal, it was the first thing I wanted to draw, especially insects, and if I can in some way share my passion for the wonderful forms of life we share the planet with in my illustrations, I will,” he says.