Olivia
Lomenech Gill

My great-great-aunt was an extremely accomplished printmaker. She worked all her life as an artist, through two world wars, and never married. I have a great respect for her skill and commitment. If she had been a man, she would have had much greater recognition and many more possibilities as an artist. However, I like to think that somehow this legacy inspired me and is continued through what I do.

Millions of people around the world have certainly seen Gill’s work by now, and we love her beautiful artwork! After seeing her depictions of magical beasts, however, it’s a bit surprising to learn that Gill says she draws mostly from life.

Because I am not good at making stuff up, I really draw on a lot of the domestic things around me... I think that if you examine the ordinary, you find the extraordinary. Once you start looking, you realize we have lots of our own fantastic beasts right here.

[Fantastic Beasts] led me first to go straight to the source of Renaissance zoology, at the National History Museum in London, where I was able to go through the first printed books on the subject, from 1550, which might have passed into the ‘modern bestiary’ that is Fantastic Beasts. I researched and learnt more about different (real) species, even if I had to adapt and alter them into something else. And, because I’m not good at making stuff up, I really draw on a lot of the domestic things around me. Of course, I’d love to go to Africa to draw, but the view out of my studio window is just as good – just minus the elephants. If you examine the ordinary, you find the extraordinary.

Her first illustrating job came about by chance, following a somewhat impromptu meeting with famous author Michael Morpurgo at a small book festival in Brittany, France, in 2009.

By Olivia Lomenech Gill’s frank admission, she had no idea – at that time – who he was. But the Northumberland-based artist clearly made an impression on the much-loved children’s author when they met

And, a short-time later, having purchased some of her work at a London exhibition, Michael and his wife Clare commissioned Olivia to illustrate their book, Where My Wellies Take Me, which was published in 2012.

Since then, the Greenaway Medal-shortlisted mother-of-three has not looked back.

Other notable projects have followed and Olivia has recently completed the commission of a lifetime, working with publishers Bloomsbury to produce a fully-illustrated version of JK Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them.

Gill believes that her first big illustration project, Clare and Michael Morpurgo’s 2012 children’s book Where My Wellies Take Me, is what won her the chance to illustrate Fantastic Beasts.

As far as I can gather, someone at Bloomsbury liked Where My Wellies Take Me and they showed this and some other work to J.K. Rowling. The first I knew about it was when I had a call from the agent I work with, Alison Eldred, asking me to do some dragons! Apparently, that got me the job.

But once she had the job, she couldn’t share the good news.

I was sworn to secrecy. When it comes to Harry Potter, everything is under wraps and for a year I worked on something that I wasn’t allowed to talk about or show.

Gill also admitted that she wasn’t too familiar with the wizarding world before taking on this project. She sees the fact that there have been so many different adaptations of the books as a testament to the richness of the world J.K. Rowling created.

I haven’t seen any of the Harry Potter films, and I didn’t see the Fantastic Beasts film. I was aware that there would be some big differences in the Warner Bros. interpretations and my own but when I asked Bloomsbury about this they said it was fine. What is great about the J.K. Rowling world is that it has given birth to so many different interpretations of the same things, it is a very generous world in this respect and that is brilliant. 

My first official illustration job came about completely by accident, when someone insisted that I meet a ‘very famous English author’, Michael Morpurgo, at a small book festival in France. He had seen me drawing and, based on that, he and his wife asked me to work on a book they were putting together. I think it was partly this book that got me the job of illustrating Fantastic Beasts. Someone at Bloomsbury liked it and showed my work to J.K. Rowling. The first I knew about it was when I had a call from my agent asking me to do some dragons. Apparently, that got me the job.

Despite the fact that Gill wasn’t part of the fandom, she did know the magnitude of Harry Potter and felt pressure to live up to the expectations of the fans.

It has been a huge privilege, but you do go through the mill a little bit with something like this. Working as an artist is a very private thing, nobody sees your work unless you choose to exhibit it. Illustration is different, and Harry Potter is something else! I was aware of this enormous following for J.K. Rowling’s work and the fact millions of people around the world would be seeing my work, but if I had stopped to think about it too much, I would have stopped dead in my tracks. I had to put it to the back of my mind and forget who I was working for, which was difficult.

Since the text in the original book was minimal, she found it of utmost important to have as many ‘real’ subjects to draw from. “One place which is in reach of where I live and work is Kielder Water Bird of Prey Centre (in England) where there is a great selection of birds to draw from, including a Stellars Sea Eagle, a White Tailed Sea Eagle, and an American Black Vulture. All of them were models for the book,” says the illustrator.

Having found the models, Gill then chose myriad mediums to create the magical beasts themselves. She says, “There are so many different beasts in this book, well over 100, so they all required a different treatment and approach. However, it was an interesting process because some of the beasts I was initially most uncertain about were the ones I ended up enjoying the most.”

Her illustrations for Where My Wellies Take Me helped get her her next job – illustrating JK Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the taxonomy of creatures in the Harry Potter universe. ‘I don’t know exactly how it came about because everything to do with Harry Potter is a bit of a secret,’ says Olivia, ‘but my agent Alison Eldred got in touch with me over Christmas and New Year and said: “Can you do some sample dragons for a job? I can’t tell you what it’s for.”’

‘I sensed it was important,’ Olivia recalls. She drew a number of different dragons, which, unbeknownst to her, were passed on to Bloomsbury and JK Rowling. She got the job, but it came with a catch: ‘I wasn’t allowed to talk about it for a year, or to show anyone anything from it,’ she says.

I had had no real contact with Harry Potter before I took on the job, but I actually didn’t see this as a problem in itself. There are experts and then there are artists, like me, who try and draw things. You come at something with no preconceptions, and if you have a sense of curiosity, you set about researching and interpreting the subject as best you can. Of course I was anxious, as I became quickly aware that there are millions of fans who love and know so much about the galaxy of Harry Potter. Any artist wants to please people with their work, but how is it possible to please SO MANY people? I set about reading all the books, which I enjoyed, and what also helped was realising that Fantastic Beasts has nothing to do with Harry Potter, actually. At least not until Harry takes the book off the shelf in the Hogwarts Library.

I haven’t seen any of the films and I was aware that there would be some big differences in the Warner Bros. interpretations and my own, but when I asked the publisher about this, they said it was fine. It’s brilliant how J.K. Rowling’s world has given birth to so many different interpretations of the same things. Apparently, when Newt Scamander comes home at the end of the film, he says that he’s going off to write his book about beasts. That’s the book I have illustrated! I did see Eddie Redmayne at an event, and I considered going up and saying ‘by the way, I just illustrated your book’, but I didn’t. He would have just wondered who on Earth this madwoman was!

The task was also daunting. ‘Most of the time you’re in the studio working on something, you make it, then decide if someone gets to see it or not,’ Olivia explains. ‘When you’re working on the Harry Potter books, you know there’s probably one or two people out there who are going to be looking at it.’

She was worried at first that her simplistic, low-tech illustrative technique wouldn’t be up to scratch. ‘You’re living in a world now where a lot of stuff is produced digitally,’ she says. ‘I thought: “How can I do combat with this glossy, amazing CGI with a burnt twig?”’

Another challenge was the timescale: while Olivia was working on her illustrations for the book, the blockbuster Hollywood film starring Eddie Redmayne was released. ‘I was worried that’d be really confusing for people because the book is nothing to do with the film – I haven’t seen the film,’ Olivia confesses. ‘But the publishers, and JK Rowling, were fine with it. That’s what’s amazing: the world of Harry Potter is so generous and open to interpretation.’

Yet Olivia brought her years of experience to bear on the project – and a fair few technical skills. ‘From the beginning, I just looked at it as a reference book. I went to the early zoological books from the 1550s by Conrad Gessner and Ulisse Aldrovandi, which brought together all this material and were done with wood-engraved illustrations,’ she says. She travelled to the Natural History Museum to see the original versions of both books, and to take inspiration. 

‘To go back to the beginnings of Renaissance zoology was important,’ she explains. ‘Fantastic Beasts is a reference book. It’s an A–Z. It’s not a story book. The characters in it are not Harry Potter characters; they’re just archetype beasts. I was trying to divorce it as much as possible from all the actual Harry Potter books because, I realised, it’s nothing to do with Harry until he finds it in the Hogwarts Library; it really is a separate entity.’

By her own admission, Olivia is very much a Muggle, having previously had limited knowledge of the Harry Potter series. But she insists that this actually helped her in the creative process when it came to Fantastic Beasts.  She said: “As an artist, I have always been narrative driven and this has led me to making work about lots of different subjects. But whatever I am working on, the more I try to learn about a subject. “There are maybe some advantages in coming at something as an outsider, with no preconceptions and a fresh approach. “What I most enjoyed about working on Fantastic Beasts was that it led me to research and learn more about different (real) species, even if I had to adapt and alter them into something else. “And because I am not good at making stuff up, I really draw on a lot of the domestic things around me. “Of course, I would love to go to the Serengeti to draw, but the view out of my studio window is just as good in its own way, just minus the elephants. I think that if you examine the ordinary, you find the extraordinary. Once you start looking, you realise we have lots of our own fantastic beasts right here.”

The work was heavy lifting: many of Fantastic Beasts’ 140 pages were illustrations, and Olivia was keen that the illustrative style was a real mix. ‘If you only worked with one medium, the whole book could become a bit monotonous with page after page of the same thing,’ she explains. ‘As an artist, perhaps because I’m self-taught, I tend to use lots of different media,’ she says. ‘It seems to me that each one is good for a different job.’

Etchings or some form of printmaking make up around a third of the illustrations in Fantastic Beasts, and some of the illustrations were created in the studio which Olivia shares with her husband Vincent, on a three-tonne printing press, made of cast iron. ‘My one slight specialism is printmaking,’ she says. ‘I do copperplate etchings. I’m very lucky to have the printing press: it’s one of the few big machines in the country. But it takes a bit of planning to move it, a low loader and a HI-AB!’

The process of trying to capture a collection of mythical beasts dreamt up by an author who has fully fleshed out an entire universe of characters was surprisingly smooth. ‘We went through a period where I did rough drawings for all the beasts and very few came back with corrections,’ explains Olivia. ‘I found it quite liberating; I had free rein to do what I wanted.’

Working on Fantastic Beasts brought Olivia some interest in her local community. ‘We had lots of people come along in Belford when we did a little launch,’ she says. But the broader impact is yet to be seen. ‘It’s very early to say what impact, if any, it’s had on my life,’ she says. ‘It hasn’t made people pick up the phone and say: “Can I commission you to do this?” But I don’t think that’s how good things happen. I don’t think good things happen overnight.’

As any self-employed person knows, one’s work hours often extend beyond any normal working week. All my family have helped with the Fantastic Beasts book. Both directly, modelling for different characters, and indirectly, because towards the end of the project I was working 18 hours a day, so my husband was doing a lot of the domestic jobs and childcare.

After many years of working with horses, Olivia began on Fantastic Beasts, a rather challenging project. Taking roughly eighteen months to complete, Olivia began the project by studying and sketching animals from real-life and Greek Mythology. Some beasts pure products of Rowling’s imagination, Olivia found them difficult to create. Once she had tackled the beasts’ general appearance, Olivia sought to make the creatures believable to the readers, visiting zoos and studying special animal collections and archives.

Living in the generation of technology and social media, computer software like Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator are popular among many contemporary designers and artists. When illustrating creatures, many may also choose to take film footage of animals “in the field” for later use. Not Olivia. She prefers the traditional way: working in situ wherever she can with pencil, charcoal and sketchbook.

Olivia believes doing rough sketches by hand somehow helped her to develop an intimate relationship with animals, and thus aids her illustration work. She also makes animal models. For example, to develop her design of the Acromantula, she created a model of a spider-like insect in her studio.

Olivia’s studio also plays a great role in the illustration process. She designed and built her studio, a strong believer that architecture affects one’s working process. It attracts many creatures, such as birds and insects. At times disturbing and troublesome, Olivia was ultimately thankful for their presence throughout this project; it was fitting that in illustrating creatures some live ones should have been present.

Some creatures described in the bestiary, such as unicorns and centaurs, existed long before Harry Potter . What was your process for reimagining these creatures in your own style while respecting the codes of mythology?It was pretty intuitive overall. I grew up with Tolkien’s books, and I’m pretty sure my dragons are inspired by his. When I started working on the book, the first step for me was to study old books, natural history encyclopedias, especially Conrad Gessner’s Historiae Animalium, and Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum Historia, which are from the 6th century. I quickly realized that a lot of the creatures in the bestiary were inspired by the real world; it’s a clever mix of mythology and very real species.

Actually, I’m very literal in my work, I only draw what’s in front of me. It was an interesting challenge to work on this project as an artist who only draws from life, and to have to come up with a method to represent things that don’t exist.

In my studio in the countryside, near the Scottish border, the natural world around me was an endless source of inspiration.

I didn’t have the opportunity to travel to the Serengeti or China, but from my studio I could draw inspiration from everything I observed around me. And that’s when you start to see how extraordinary nature is; the swallows that travel from southern Africa and come and build their nests on the roof of my studio, for example, I find that wonderful.

I also asked my husband and son to pose for me, to make different creatures, it became a family album, even our chickens found their place in the book.

Throughout this work, I never ceased to marvel at the complexity of these creatures, but also at their fragility in a world that seems oblivious to ecological perils. I don’t know if this was JK Rowling’s goal, but for me , Fantastic Beasts was an opportunity to highlight the beauty and diversity of our world.

That’s how I started giving various creatures environments that add something to them. I love the idea that you can see an island, that a dragon might be sleeping on the island, but you can’t see it because it’s camouflage and it’s the island itself.

Other creatures just stand on the page without context, which should help create rhythm and flow, and I worked closely with the art director to make sure there was enough change and variety in appearances and styles.

Actually, as far as I know I was pretty free. I was allowed to do pretty much whatever I wanted. Initially I did rough drafts for each of the creatures and those drawings had to be approved. The pose, the number of limbs, the layout on the page, that sort of thing.

It went through several levels of approval I think, and so was looked at by different people, probably JK Rowling as well. In fact there were very few times where I actually got feedback that said ‘you need to do this differently’.

The Occamy

The Occamy, proudly displayed on the cover as well, turned out to be her favourite to draw because of the same reason. “The Occamy (a serpentine winged creature) is one of the Indian beasts, along with the Phoenix. For the Occamy I was able to incorporate some background context, which are the drawings I did on site at the Royal Cenotaphs near Bhuj years ago when staying with a relative.” Gill found inspiration for the beasts from a variety of sources. “There are different ‘strata’ of beasts in the book,” she says, “some that JK Rowling created entirely from scratch, as it were, then some which are drawn from classical mythology and, finally, some which are drawn from real life creatures, in single or hybrid form.”

The Basilisk

My favorite detail in books is the toad on a chicken egg that is hatching a basilisk. It is a toad that I found in my garden, I caught it in a bucket to draw it. I did it on copper to recall the old bestiaries of the Middle Ages. I really like old books, old maps... The curves and the technique of old books, of artists, it is extraordinary. Look at Rembrandt’s lines for example. Next to him, I feel like a crook.

The Bowtruckle

It was hard to do, because they are described as being very hard to see, very small, and a little red. And I realized, when I saw a picture of the movies, where it is apple green, that they did not take the description from the book.

I considered not showing them at all. I said to the editor, “If they are hard to see, I should just not put them in, and the readers can have fun trying to find them,” but I was told I was not allowed to do that.

The Chimaera

Some of the beasts I was initially most uncertain about were the ones I ended up enjoying the most. The Chimaera (a mix of lion, goat and dragon) was one.

For the Chimaera, she took inspiration from sketchbook drawings she did when she visited the Roman ruins of Palmyra. “I didn’t really think about it at the time,” she adds, “I was just trying to learn to draw. But in recent years, with the tragic conflict that has happened in Syria, I felt that I could use these background drawings (against which the creatures are set) as a metaphor for a beast capable of enormous destruction.

That helped me with the portrayal of this particular beast. I did the final version as a drypoint (drawing directly onto aluminium plate and printing) with collage and hand handcolouring involved.”

One of the most difficult was the Chimaera. It’s a bit of a weird hybrid: lion’s head, goat’s body and dragon’s tail. I couldn’t work out how to represent it in a sufficiently terrifying way. But while I was working, there was the awful conflict going on in Syria, one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. I would see brief bits of the news and think about the people I knew there and wonder what was happening. And then Palmyra got blown up. I had sat many years ago at that site and done lots of drawings of the most incredible example of classical architecture. This was how I made that particular beast come to life: using the drawings of Palmyra in the background as a small tribute, with the Chimaera as a metaphor for devastation.

For example, the chimera, it was quite complicated. The description begins with a lion’s head. It’s quite scary, a lion’s head, it’s dangerous, it’s one of the most dangerous animals in the book, we started well.

Then there’s the body of the goat. That’s a little trickier, I wondered how I was going to do it... I went and drew my neighbors’ goats. And then there’s the dragon’s tail, I try to do the different drawings, I do a few tests, but I wasn’t sure if it really looked terrifying.

Sometimes the problem was solved by landscapes, by placing the animals in a particular environment. For the chimera, I dug out old drawings that I had done in Palmyra, Syria, where I lived as a teenager. I used them for this illustration of the chimera to give it a little flavor, because it is a Greek animal, to anchor it in reality. And to indicate the potential for destructiveness of this beast, I added a statue broken into pieces. It was a way of solving the problem and also bringing something personal to the drawing. I think that when you integrate your own stories, your own concerns into your work, it can speak more. And in this case that is what happened, I brought my own sketchbook into the book to give a place, a habitat, and perhaps a story to this creature.

As I was working on this book, these cities, these landscapes, some of the most beautiful Roman ruins that exist and that I had drawn 20 years earlier, were being bombed, and I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to these people I had known there, where they were, if they were still alive. I saw all this and wondered what I could do... Of course, drawing them doesn’t change anything, but it was both my homage to this place, and a way of empowering this creature, of making its threat more real, more gripping for the reader.

The Eruptive

Normally I only draw from my immediate surroundings, so it was a bit strange when I started working on this project, because a lot of the elements in the book are completely invented. But when I understood where Rowling got her inspiration for these creatures, I understood how I had to proceed.

For example, there is this creature, the eruptive, which strongly resembles a rhinoceros. To represent it, I went to see real rhinoceroses in a zoo and I drew them. It was the same with the birds.

The Hippogriff

The format of the page also greatly influenced the way each creature was depicted. For example, the hippogriff, I had originally drawn it as it is described in the book, with the body of a horse and the head and wings of an eagle.

To me, a horse’s body normally consists of four legs that have hooves at the end. So I had drawn it, proportionally and anatomically, it worked, but when the draft was approved, I was rereading the books, and I got to the part where Malfoy is injured, scratched by Buckbeak. I then realized that he was not scratched by a horse’s hoof but by a claw, so the front legs must be those of an eagle.

I went back to the editor and said, “This drawing has been approved, but it actually has horse legs.” They said I was right and that had to be changed, which changed the way the creature was represented, because an eagle leg works very differently than a horse leg, they are completely opposite in their articulation.

For example, the eagle’s legs are its strongest limbs, the eagle’s talons are the most dangerous part of its body. A horse’s legs, when jumping over an obstacle, bend in the opposite direction to an eagle’s limbs when it swoops down on its prey. And then there’s the size, the weight distribution... Since I’m a very literal artist all of these points were important to me, so I had to rethink the whole position of the hippogriff on the page because of that.

I decided to do it standing up and I also did a young hippogriff, because I wanted to imagine what it would look like at birth.

I did sketches, sent them to the art director, I guess they went to JK Rowling’s agent, maybe to JK Rowling herself, and most of the time they came back accepted and I just had to produce the final illustrations. But it was often when I started the final illustrations that I ran into problems.

I have been faced with cases where, when you do a quick draft, you say “yes, this works, it will look good”. But when I started working on a larger scale and with more details, I often said to myself “but what am I going to do with this?”. I created problems for myself, and then you have to solve them.

The Manticore

Some of the beasts I was initially most uncertain about were the ones I ended up enjoying the most. The Manticore (a mix of human, lion and scorpion) was one.

“The Manticore was an etching,” she says, “which I did in the style of the old ‘engraved cut-out’ toy soldiers children used to use and play with in Victorian times. This was my way to portray the ferocity of the beast, by including some ‘cut out’ body parts, in a stylised way, of its unfortunate victims.”

The Water Beings

The other ones that were difficult to grasp were the water beings. In fiction, these characters are often depicted in a sexy way, with long hair, half-naked, whereas in Harry Potter there is a more sinister, more frightening side to them. I also had to juggle with the fact that I was not allowed to have nudity in the book. This is the kind of case where the limits, the rules imposed, completely redefine the approach and take us in an unsuspected direction, from a creative point of view.

This ban on depicting naked people gave me the idea of ​​water beings wearing a kind of clothing, sailors’ clothes, which would have been lost in shipwrecks, which the water beings would have inherited and adopted, a bit like some indigenous peoples.

There were also the backgrounds which were inspired by incredible troglodyte dwellings in Turkey. I have never been there but I saw some images and I decided to use this place for these creatures, it was immediately obvious.

The Werewolf

There were creatures like werewolves or water beings that posed a problem for me, because they often exist in legends that don’t speak to me at all or in horror films. I’m not really attracted to anything gothic either, and I wanted to find a way to make them more real. I did it simply, by drawing the man, and I tried to understand what happens when they transform into werewolves. I ended up with the wolf, because I really like wolves, it wasn’t difficult to do. The middle of the transformation was the most complicated, because I wanted to stay on something as realistic as possible, not like in the movies.

The Yeti

For the Yeti page, for example, I knew I wanted to draw the Himalayas; I love prayer flags , stupas , all those colors, it gives off a certain magnificence.

At one point, we had a conversation with the editor about Yetis, whether they were easy to see or not, and I was leaning towards no, since they are described as avoiding fire and humans. That’s why you see the Yeti small, walking away, and in the foreground, these humans, oblivious to what’s happening in the mountain and the presence of fantastical animals. There are other places where I tried to play on that.

Kindle in Motion

Dragons snorting smoke and flapping their wings... A Crup cheerfully wagging its forked tail... A Hidebehind eerily materialising in a forest... A Fire Crab shooting flames out of its bottom... All these creatures and many more can be seen moving in the Kindle in Motion edition of J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them which is out now.

Olivia Lomenech Gill’s evocative illustrations have been transferred from page to digital device and lovingly turned into moving drawings, in the same way that Jim Kay’s artwork for Philosopher’s Stone was animated for a Kindle in Motion edition last year. The result is a reference book for magical creatures that all but comes to life in your hands.

This is the first time Olivia, who also illustrates books for Michael Morpurgo, has seen any of her work animated using this technology. She’s pretty thrilled about the experience, too, mainly because of the way she usually works. ‘I spend a lot of my time in the studio on my own,’ she says in our interview, ‘and the one frustrating thing for me – though I still work a lot with storytelling – is that the images are always static. It’s a kind of technical hitch of working as an artist!’

All that has changed now, though. We interviewed Olivia alongside Jim to see how both artists feel about seeing their static art given another dimension, and also what they make of each other’s artwork. As you can see, both artists get along famously and are really pleased with the end results.