Harry Potter: The Blueprints is a must-have collectible for any Harry Potter fan, full of intricately detailed behind-the-scenes artwork that captures the creative development of the wizarding world. That said, besides the incredible art and the crew commentary, Harry Potter: The Blueprints is a model-maker’s dream. A foot’s not a lot – at 1:24 scale, that comes out to half an inch in the miniature – but it helps to line things up as closely as I can. It’s easiest to just make the walls really deep and then cover a lot of it up with the terrain later on.

This is also the only plan I have of the training grounds tower from the COS redesign, and of the adjacent pathway that would eventually change in HBP.Student of popular culture, American and European history, architecture, photography, mixed-media crafts, comic books, mythology, illustration, and traveling. It was at this point that I spontaneously made a work-in-progress video tour of the SS castle, which then morphed into a tour of the COS castle too. Inside that newly created map, Blueprints -> Open Level Blueprint (at the top), and create your logic there or spawn your own blueprint and continue from there.

I was using Open Image Denoise before, but OptiX is faster and it’s retaining more detail, so I’m pretty stoked! I’m grateful to the deeply skilled drafters who brought these to life, and to the folks who’ve made them available to us fans! There's "Harry Potter: A Pop-Up Guide to Hogwarts" and "Diagon Alley: A Pop Up Guide" (both paper-engineered by Matthew Reinhart), "A Hogwarts Christmas Pop-Up," "The Art of Wand Work" for the limited edition "Harry Potter: The Wand Collection," "The Broom Collection," "Exploring Hogwarts," and "Exploring Diagon Alley.The language in the books is not always particularly precise, so there is a little room for flexibility in the interpretation. Stuart Craig’s team tweaked its footprint a bit and built it up into a much taller complex of towers; the bottom floors just looked like Alnwick while the upper floors took their stylistic cues from the original castle’s other conical turrets. The Hogwarts founders may have been able to wave their wands to build the castle we all know and love, but Muggles wishing to build a replica have to put in a whole lot more work.