Harry Potter Fan Paints First Page as Wall Art

Potter fan Meredith McCardle painted the first page of the series on the wall of her home office for inspiration!

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Meredith McCardle is a former attorney turned author whose Twitter bio states “Harry Potter is a religion.” Her latest project might be of great interest to other super fans of the wizarding world. As an ardent fan and an author, McCardle wanted to decorate her home office with something inspirational and decided on the first page and a half of J.K. Rowling’s books.

Using a borrowed overhead projector (that’s old classroom tech for you young whippersnappers), she projected the text onto the wall and traced each letter. Despite taking 20 hours to trace instead of the 2 that she estimated, her Potter devotion never wavered and kept on going for the 40 more hours of painting letters to complete the project. That’s 261 words using 1,205 characters in Adobe Garamond for you font nerds and it looks amazing!

As you can see, fans aren’t the only ones impressed by her hard work.

On her website she writes about her project and explains her choice of pages:

"I really did struggle with which page I wanted to do. My first instinct was to do a passage from Prisoner of Azkaban because I’m a time travel writer, so it would have been a fun little ode to a genre I love so much, but then I quickly realized that anything with dialogue does not translate well to the wall. It leaves too many blank spaces, and while that might be Taylor Swift’s thing, it’s not very visually appealing. So that really limited me to opening pages. I went back through the first pages of every book, but a nagging voice kept telling me I needed to start at the beginning, on the very first page of the very first book. Where the magic begins."

TODAY interviewed McCardle about her project, asking if she has any advice to share from her experience:

Measure each line as you go and don’t rely on the projector to stay straight. She learned that the hard way.
Use good quality paint. “Trust me when I say you will not want to do a second coat. I used interior wall paint. It took less than a quart to cover the wall.”
If there’s such a thing as a pencil that doesn’t smudge, use it! “I just used a regular pencil, and I had to go back and clean all of the smudge marks off the wall when I was done painting. That was easily the most annoying part of the project.”
Have patience, listen to some upbeat music, and trust that it’s going to be amazing when it’s done!

Next: No Plans for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Audiobook

If you were going to pick a page for decoration, what book and page would you choose?

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