HP: The Yule Ball

FULL-VIEW is NOT dial-up friendly.

Okay, I did this massively-huge pic for part of my entry for FictionAlley's "Try-Wizard Tournament" ( [link] ). You can read the first part of my entry, a ficlet called "The Dancing Lesson", here: [link] , and see the second part, and animated icon based on this drawing, here: [link]

At roughly 12x40 inches (at 300 DPI no less!), this is easily the largest digital piece I've ever done, as well as the most complex work of art I've ever attempted. I've been working on this for something like a week and a half, maybe even two weeks -- I think there's over 200 layers! (I compiled and saved as new files as I went; there are 25 files in all! Despite saving in stages, near the end some of the files were so big my puter started lagging terribly. I know one of them is 117 meg!) Man, working out the perspective/scaling was a nightmare! I took figures that were already done and enlarged or shrunk them when I went to do the next characters, in an attempt to keep it all relative. I dunno if I entirely succeeded, but at this point, I say it's good enough! LOL And I think the lighting helped. I would have done a bit more for the background than the frost and that lonely strand of garland, but having been up since 10:30 am the morning before, by 7 am this morning I just couldn't take anymore -- especially knowing I needed to do the animated icon still, and turn it all in before I went to sleep! (The deadline was noon today.)

Hopefully you can tell that Ginny is staring at Harry, Harry is staring at Cho, and Ron, Draco, Pansy, and Crabbe are all staring at Hermione. (Yeah, I know, Draco and Pansy were staring before they all sat down to dinner in the book, but I figure they'd still be gawking and saying "I just don't believe it" afterwards Fred and Angelina are making their way to the dance floor, of course. And I liked the idea of those cushion-seat things in the movie -- that way I didn't have to draw chair-backs And if you're wondering about the funny poses, waltzes don't always consist of just the standard his-hand-on-her-waist, her-hand-on-his-shoulder pose -- I've always had a soft spot for moves like this, and I figured it worked better for the layout I wanted.

This pic is way too big to show all the close-ups under the image the way I normally do, so instead I've posted the close-ups in sections, in my Scraps. I did the image in many, many transparent layers in Photoshop, with characters overlapping and atmospheric lighting -- I'm just compiling the character's layers into groupings and showing them to you sans-lighting effects, so the close-ups are a bit different than what you see here. There is also a little commentary about what I did with each character.

You can see the Trio's close-up here: [link]

Viktor, Parvati, Cedric, Fleur, and Cho here: [link]

Pansy, Draco, Crabbe, and another shot of Fleur here: [link]

Fred, Angelina, Padma, Neville, and Ginny here: [link]

AND there's an *alternate* version of Ginny here: [link]

There are no close-ups of the rest of the Slytherins at that table; I basically just took the characters I already had and altered them, since you can't see them all that well anyway. Behind Crabbe you can see a bit of Goyle. To Goyle's left is Millicent. To her left is Theodore Nott. Next to him is Daphne Greengrass. And next to her is Blaise Zabini. I didn't include a close-up of the Ravenclaw Roger Davies either, for the same reasons.

Done in Photoshop Elements with a Wacom Graphire 3 drawing tablet.

(You do know that Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, Ginny Weasley, Fred Weasley, Angelina Johnson, Neville Longbottom, Victor Krum, Padma Patil, Parvati Patil, Cedric Diggory, Fleur Delacour, Cho Chang, Draco Malfoy, Pansy Parkinson, Vincent Crabbe, Gregory Goyle, Roger Davies, Millicent Bulstrode, Theordore Nott, Daphne Greengrass, and Blaise Zabini are all © J K Rowling and Warner Bro.s, right?)