Celebrate Easter with a set of Harry Potter Easter Eggs!
In the early 2000s, were you one of those people lining up outside the bookstore doors, waiting to get the new Harry Potter book at midnight, so that you could spend the rest of the night immersed in the cozy familiarity of the wizarding world? Have you been cautious about what you are talking about for days afterward because your friends might not have gotten to the same chapter yet? Have you named your cat after the most questionable professor of Hogwarts, Severus Snape? Have you made yourself a robe with a wand, and it wasn’t just for Halloween?
Confession time: in my teen years, I’ve done all of these things!
Alright, the cat wasn’t mine – my best friend selected this name for a black kitten she rescued. It was shortened to Sev right away, but the beast with the proud name still lives and prospers. The wand is long ago lost, but it doesn’t matter: all these memories seem to be strongly intertwined with the rest of my youth, which made the Harry Potter series a very special story for me.
It’s fun to revisit such memories, so in spring 2017, I decided to entertain myself by painting a set of Harry Potter wooden eggs.
It was tough deciding on the characters to paint because so many are memorable – both in personality and in looks! I knew I had to include the trio. Excluding Severus Snape also didn’t seem like an option. I considered adding Voldemort, whose bold head looks like an egg anyway, but his overall persona didn’t seem charismatic enough. Dobby would make a fun egg, but I would have had to drill holes to insert some extra ears! I briefly thought about Tonks, Draco and Hagrid, but in the end chose Dumbledore, who is a pivotal character of the series, and Luna, who is not – but who is my personal favourite. I also couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make her radish earrings!
Materials for Making the Harry Potter Eggs
- wooden eggs
- acrylic paints (I like to use Liquitex Basics or Amsterdam Acrylics, but any brand of paint should work)
- detail brush
- Sharpie ultra-fine point marker or Sakura Pigma Micron ink pen
Painting the Harry Potter Eggs
It always helps to make sketches first. Just for the sake of interest, this is how the eggs looked in pencil. After that, I drew the designs on the eggs.
The rest is just colouring, layer after layer. Start with the bottom layer. In this case, the bottom layer is the skin. For the characters with neckties, the shirt comes next, followed by the robe. For the characters with scarves, the robe precedes the scarves. After that, it’s the hair’s turn. I usually do the face last, but that’s a matter of preference. The facial features usually have to be re-sketched because they get covered by the skin layer.
This is my workspace: the eggs, a little water container, and a plastic pallet.
Tips and Tricks
I use two brushes: a detail brush, often labelled as #0, for details and a small one, labelled as #2, for filling the areas. Since the eggs are pretty small, even filling areas doesn’t require a big brush. I use water to wash brushes between colours, but when I put paint onto the eggs, I make sure that the paint isn’t diluted with water.
Whenever possible, feel free to use the ink pen to refine and draw details (eyelashes, pupils, nostrils). I also use it at the very end to make outlines.
Step-by-Step Tutorial
Snape and Dumbledore are made in a similar fashion, but I painted them a little later.
I always thought that I would wait until my son (4.5) was older before introducing him to the Harry Potter series. But, of course, he got interested in the eggs and asked what the characters were named. So now we have Harry Potter flying into space, and even though I still want to wait a few years before reading the books to him, it’s rather amusing to hear familiar names from the play corner.
More Magical Crafts
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This is incredible