First off, I'd like to say that this has been incredibly fun.  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is by far my favourite book in the series, and to have the freedom and time to throw myself into illustrating it has been both a pleasure and good exercise.  Some thanks are in order:

• To my roommates, who put up with me disappearing into my sketchbook or onto the computer for long periods of time (and not, say, cleaning the kitchen), as well as my giddy spells when drawings for favourite parts of the book turned out unexpectedly well.

• To M. B. for being my page tester and cheerleading section, as well as providing me with conversational distraction when working in Front Page got tedious.

• To S. M. K. for convincing me that the world needs more Lupin, and inspiring a couple of my favourite gag sketches.

• To Bardel for employing me, immersing me in the company of extremely talented individuals from whom I learned boatloads, and promising to re-hire me in the fall, which meant I didn't have to spend the summer looking for work but instead spent it drawing utterly frivolous amateur illustrations for a kids' book.

• To John Williams, for writing the score to the third movie, which works perfectly as a score to the book as well, and provided me with appropriate background music for much of my work here.

• And, saving the best for last, to Joanne Rowling, for writing such a compelling novel with such interesting characters and strong imagery, rich enough to serve as a source for more than ninety drawings.

The initial aim of The Azkaban Project was to preserve on paper as much of my mental "movie" of the third book as I possibly could.  In this I believe I succeeded, more or less – I didn't jot down every single scene but I did get the ones that were important to me.  Re-reading the book before the release of the movie and forcing myself to get a concrete enough image to make thumbnails probably did a lot to cement my mental movie before Mr. Cuarón could influence it with his. Similarly, going back to my thumbnails and using them to remind me how I saw a particular scene, and then fleshing it out according to my remembered imagination, did a lot to erase whatever effect the movie may have had on me.  Not that the movie was bad – I actually quite enjoyed it – but as far as drawing goes, the less I remember of it, the better.  It helped that my favourite scenes were done so differently on film: if they had been truer to the book, they might have had a higher chance of influencing my own images, which were based so closely on the text.  (Ironically, this led to me liking the movie more, because if it had erased my own favourite scenes I'd never have forgiven it.)

The quality of the drawings themselves, and my satisfaction with them, varies.  They're all better than most of the other Pottery artwork on my site, mostly because they're a lot newer and I've improved my drawing skills since the last time I drew much Pottery artwork.  However, it's easy to tell which drawings I really enjoyed and which I just got done to get to the good stuff.  Really, I should have taken more care with pieces such as Harry under Honeydukes or Harry and Ron walking back from trying out the Firebolt - if it didn't work the first time, I ought to have taken another stab at it rather than just putting up what I had and hoping no one would notice the difference.  I really enjoyed drawing the Shrieking Shack scene - can you tell?  I also feel I made a real breakthrough with Sirius - whenever I'd drawn him before, it was a fight all the way, but suddenly he just came really naturally, and exactly as I had imagined him.

With the number of drawings I've put together for The Azkaban Project, I estimate that at long last the balance has tipped in favour of recent (i.e. good) drawings.  Yay! 

The most unexpected pleasant surprise was the colouring.  I've always been miserable at colouring whole scenes, or at least thought I was ... but when I started painting the few coloured pictures on my site I found that I could actually make them look halfway decent.  This has been very encouraging and makes it likely that more drawings will be coloured.  I'm fairly certain the cause of this sudden improvement in colour sense is the edifying environment at work, where every day I could see fabulous colour keys and backgrounds and see the art director in action.  Some of it must have sunk in, somehow.

For the entire life of my site I have tried to be as fair as possible in distributing pictures among characters and books in a just way.  While some characters have nevertheless been shortchanged (such as Fred and George, Hagrid, and the Quidditch team) I actually made an effort to restrict the number of Azkaban drawings and work on beefing out the ranks of Chamber and Goblet, even though Azkaban is my favourite book by far. This time the gloves were off and it was my duty to draw as much as possible.  After about thirty seconds of deliberation I decided this should apply to characters as well, and my longtime policy of Lupin control was retired. He's my favourite character, I reasoned, and this may be my last chance to draw him how I imagine him, so why deny myself the opportunity?  How could I forgive myself if I didn't take full advantage of it?  I was surprised, at the end, to discovered there really weren't as many pictures of him as I thought there would be, and that Snape had almost as many new ones, if not more.

The new robe design is a mixed bag.  In looking back to the text when fleshing out my thumbnails, I've found references to belts and to being able to reach inside one's robes to grab a wand at a moment's notice.  However, in Goblet, "old Archie" at the Quidditch World Cup wears a woman's nightgown because he likes "a healthy breeze 'round his privates" so obviously pants are a Muggle thing and therefore the open-fronted-robe-over-regular-clothes model of the movies is wrong as well.  Treating the robes as free-flowing has gotten me to abandon the shortcuts I used in high school which are bad habits and put a crimp in my drawing style whenever I do them, but I think in the future I shall go with a design closer to what I had before.  I like what I've done with the collar but there really ought to be something around the waist for canon's and practicality's sakes.

In a note that is probably interesting only to me, I should have had more foresight in naming the html files.  I thought, when I started, that there would be no way on earth I'd have more than ten pages, so I started with new0604-1 instead of new0604-01 as I should have.  This means that now my file list reads 1, 10, 11, 12 .... 19, 2, 20, 3 ... It's a little confusing.  But it's not worth it to go back and change the filenames, which would mean changing all the links, just to get the pages to go in the right order on the file list.

In response to a few emails I've received: no, I am not planning a Goblet Project or a Phoenix Project.  I didn't do one for Stone or Chamber.  I just like the third book so much and I so strongly did not want it to be changed in my head by the movie that I had to do this for my own sake.

Thanks to everyone who's emailed me with kind words and support – this update probably wouldn't have happened half so quickly if it wasn't for the audience.