Remus Lupin

Here we have Professor Remus Lupin (as you might have guessed from my previous work, a favourite character of mine), as played by David Thewlis in the Harry Potter film series. I've been experimenting with textures, so I'd appreciate any feedback you might have!

How I imagined Remus (or as close as I can get with my limited "drawing-from-imagination" skills): [link]


(You can ignore the rest of this if you want. It's a bit of a rant, and mainly here because I wanted to get it out of my system.)

I've been a Harry Potter fan for pretty much as long as I can remember, and as such I've always been in two minds about the movies. While I think they're very well made, and love how popular they've become, the books have always been the definitive version to me. It's for this reason that I was rather reluctant to start drawing portraits of HP characters based on their movie appearances. I have my own images in my head of what the characters look like, and thanks to the Stephen Fry audio books, I have an idea of how they sound, too. So, it seemed a bit odd to draw the movie versions.

But, recently I came to the conclusion that it didn't really matter what version of the characters I was drawing. For me, drawing is an excuse to spend a long period of time thinking about a character, which is a large part of the enjoyment. So therefore it didn't really matter what they looked like, because it's their personalities and character that cause me to like them so much and enjoy thinking about them, not their physical appearance. So, I've decided to bite the bullet and draw some HP portraits.

I started with Remus because, although he's a prime example of a character who was pretty far from how I imagined him, he's long been my favourite character. His physical appearance doesn't change the fact that I consider him one of the most admirable characters in fiction, or the fact that he's my hero. When I was drawing him at school, a couple of people commented that he wasn't particularly (or even at all) good looking, which I can honestly say I hadn't really noticed. In my mind, when I'm drawing I'm drawing a character, not an actor, and that's because I want to think about the character, not spend hours staring at a pretty face.

Anyway, rant over. If you've stuck with it this far, I'd be really interested to here what you have to say on the issue. When you make art, is it in order to appreciate physical qualities, or is it really about something different?