Cauldrons

I repainted several different designs for the cauldrons. First, there was the bubbling cauldron with color-changing fog. This was made with a large diameter shallow bucket and a water fog machine. I then simply added some silver dry brushing to add a more realistic aged metal effect to the otherwise plain black bucket.

Here you can see the progression of the stages of the cauldron from start to weathered to in action at the event. The potion bottles around this cauldron were also made by me and are simply ingredients that may often be found around the house.

The second design was a cauldron with flames molded into the body. For these, I began carefully dry brushing the silver to give the impression they were pewter cauldrons. For the flame, I tried to airbrush a flame by starting with a white and then adding the different colours starting with yellow and then orange and finally the red.

This is the third design of Cauldron that I painted. These cauldrons actually light up and slowly change colour. They started plain black so I began by painting the Hogwarts crest in a nice bright gold as it is often shown as being a flat golden yellow colour. After that, I did some dry brushing with a dark silver colour. To make some of the cauldrons look older and more used, I added more silver to some and less to others so each cauldron ended up having its own unique look. After that, to add another layer of dirt and grime I added a layer of black shoe polish. For the cauldron with the most silver paint, I added large drips and pools of the shoe polish as if lots of potions have bubbled over the edge and burnt onto the metal over it years of use at Hogwarts. These cauldrons were put together with various other items I have made to create the table centres.

Each of the table centres were comprised of a few different potions I made such as Dragons blood (hand sanitizer & red food colouring), Powdered Root of Asphodel (Coffee powder), and more. They also had books that I created custom covers so that they resembled actual books used at Hogwarts for studying and other books that may be seen at Flourish & Blotts Bookseller. Some of these books include Advanced Potion Making (as seen in The Half-Blood Prince), several of Gilderoy Lockheart’s biographies and more.