'Arry Potter

The illustrator of new version speaks.  "I was worried I'd ruin the most popular child's book in history."

He uses a wide range of techniques, from Ralph Steadman-like splats to Holbein-esque portraits to ghostly watercoloured landscapes, richly textured backgrounds and gnarly, impacted details that are all his own. Kay pulls out of a drawer an early sketch for his phenomenally finicky Diagon Alley panorama. Drawing it, he says, “was almost like knitting – you start at one end and move along”. But others were much trickier. The Astronomy Tower was a building he could never get right – at first he thought perhaps a serpent could pierce the tower, but he still couldn’t detach himself enough from reality. “I had this note for a while that said, ‘It’s fantasy, stupid.’ Because I kept bringing everything back down to physics and logistics and you don’t need to do that because it’s supported by magic, you know. It took a long time to get rid of that – it’s so ingrained.”

J.K. Rowling approves.