Emma Watson was a guest on Ellen today to discuss her newest film, Noah, which will be released in theatres on March 28th. In the interview she discusses the Oscars, graduating from Brown, and writing a journal to help her remember all her experiences.

In a new interview with MTV UK, Emma Watson discusses how she stayed grounded while growing up and her impending graduation. For those of you who enjoy fashion, Emma is wearing a Stella McCartney dress in the interview which can be watched here.

“I’m very excited to graduate,” she said. “I’ll be having a hell of a party! It’ll just be a relief, I think, because I’ve been juggling so much and it’ll just be really nice to be able to just focus on one thing.”

“I’ve been so fortunate in the people that I’ve had around me and I honestly think that makes or breaks a child that works in this industry,” Emma said in an interview. “You have to have people that truly care about that child’s best interests. It can be a very corrupt environment for a young person,” she added.

There are 5 new auctions that may be of interest to Harry Potter fans on the Nate D. Sanders Fine Autographs and Memorabilia Monthly Auctions website. The following items are up for auction:

1. Original Artwork for the Cover of “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” — Illustration by Cliff Wright Depicts the Charming & Memorable Flying Car Scene

Original ink, pencil and watercolor artwork for the 1998 release of J.K. Rowling’s second book in the groundbreaking series, ”Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.” Illustration is by British artist Cliff Wright, whom J.K. Rowling tapped to illustrate most of her Harry Potter characters, including Hedwig the Owl and Harry Potter himself, both displayed here in this watercolor. Unsigned illustration, which appears on the book’s cover, depicts the memorable scene in the book when Ron Weasley steals his father’s Ford Anglia to escort Harry back to Hogwarts. Wright charmingly brings each character to life in the illustration – Potter is depicted in his signature glasses and red pullover, and Ron is depicted with flaming red hair and freckles. Both Harry and Ron are pictured grinning at their flying car feat, while Potter’s famed owl, Hedwig, is perched in the back seat. Illustration is glazed, mounted and framed to an overall size of 22.5” x 19”, with two annotations written along top reading: ”please return Aw [artwork] to: / (undamaged)” and ”For: Harry Potter shop display / To: Rosamund Walker — Bloomsbury”. Bloomsbury then superimposed this illustration with a background landscape also done by Wright to create the finished cover design. Near fine.

2. Original Artwork for the Cover of “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” — Depicting Harry Riding the Mythical Creature, Buckbeak, Under the Moonlight — Signed by Artist Cliff Wright

Imaginative ink and watercolor cover art for the original 1999 Bloomsbury edition of J.K. Rowling’s third book, ”Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban,” in the series that forever changed children’s literature. This third draft ”rough” – nearing the final design – is signed by British artist Cliff Wright, who first brought many of Rowling’s concepts and characters to life for the series. Watercolor and ink drawing depicts Harry on the legendary Hippogriff beast, endearingly called Buckbeak. Here, Wright depicts the climactic scene in the book when Harry Potter and Hermione Granger go back in time, flying on Buckbeak through the night’s sky to save Sirius Black from a tower where he is imprisoned, sending him away to freedom on Buckbeak’s back. Of illustrating the Harry Potter series, Wright has said, ”…a passage from the book was suggested and I began to draw ideas working closely with the publisher. So as to retain as much vitality as possible in the final watercolour painting I only produce small-scale quick pencil/pen sketches as roughs. Time is spent on character and composition but not yet on execution, so my roughs are very simple.” This draft shows maturation in the draft process, with colors and design almost entirely fleshed out. Illustration measures 5.5” x 5” on a standard-sized sheet of paper and is signed ”Cliff Wright” at lower right, with additional handwritten comments in margins noting, ”trainers” and ”Emma / Changes as requested. Cliff”. Near fine condition.

3. Rare Deluxe First U.K. Edition & First Printing “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”

Prized deluxe U.K. first edition of ”Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” Bloomsbury Publishing: London: 1999. The second novel in J.K. Rowling’s series continues the story of boy wizard Harry Potter and his friends. Runs 251pp. and measures 6.25” x 9.5”. Bound in pictorial blue cloth boards with gilt lettering. All edges gilt. Light bumping to board and spine corners, else fine. A beautifully bound tome from the best selling book series of all time.

4. “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” — First American Edition, First Printing

5. “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” — First American Edition, First Printing

In a new interview with The London Evening Standard, Bonnie Wright talks about her career, visiting music festivals, Harry Potter and even her beau. Next month she will be starring in The Sea, the film adaptation of John Banville’s novel. She is also finishing two films she directed, and acting in another that has not been revealed yet.

In the interview they talk about the recent breakfast Bonnie hosted with her mother to raise money for Oxfam’s Mother Appeal which raises money to help mothers worldwide lift themselves and their families out of poverty. Oxfam asked her to become an ambassador after a visit to Senegal in 2012 and they hosted a breakfast earlier this month to raise money and awareness.

Events like [the breakfast], supported by the Government, “are good because life can be quite solo”. She mentions community again, “people miss getting together”. “And Government support makes people go ‘wow’, we have to support it. What’s important is it shows the government’s respect for those who are trying to raise money even in a time where things are financially difficult for people.”

A video that Oxfam uploaded to YouTube from her breakfast may be watched below:

She also talks a little about her start in Harry Potter, which is all thanks to her brother:

It was her older brother Louis, now a 26-year-old fine artist, who started her career. “He told me I remind him of Ginny. You believe everything your older brother says. We asked my mum and she didn’t know how to go about getting me an audition but being a driven mother she called up Bloomsbury, who gave her the number for the casting director.”

Harry Potter is “10 years of good memories”. “I know any step I go on to now is thanks to that and I’ll never forget it’s been part of my foundation.” She even kissed Daniel Radcliffe — “It was unusual. We’d known each other eight years. I was 17 so it wasn’t my first kiss. It becomes mechanical in front of lots of people but it’s better than it being a stranger, someone you’ve never met.” Radcliffe is: “an incredibly hard working guy who never does anything by halves or loosely”.

And as for the recent remarks from J?K Rowling that Harry should have ended up with Hermione, she says: “Ginny would have dealt with it. She’s a capable, independent woman.”

Featherologist, Val Jones, who worked in the creature effects department on the Harry Potter film series, has today been drafted back to Warner Bros. Studio Tour London – The Making of Harry Potter to refresh Buckbeak the Hippogriff.

Val, who was instrumental in creating the animatronic, was called in to re-feather and preen the delicate winged creature in preparation for the Feathers and Flight event, which is taking place at Warner Bros. Studio Tour London – The Making of Harry Potter from Friday 4th April to Sunday 27th April.

This is the first make-over Buckbeak has received since the hugely popular Harry Potter film series was made. His intricate coat is created from thousands of individually airbrushed chicken and goose feathers that Val will carefully clean and replenish in time for the start of Feathers and Flight.

After beginning her career as a Textiles Designer, Val made costumes for films before specialising in hair, feathers and animatronics. By painstakingly inserting thousands of feathers, Val worked tirelessly to create the Hippogriff’s intricate feathery coat and was responsible for transforming the model into a believable creature that moved like a real animal.

She said:  “Buckbeak was one of the most challenging creatures I’ve ever worked on. It took almost a year and a team of 20 to build three versions of him. We worked closely with mechanical engineers to replicate the exact wing movement and skeleton of a real bird. Each version required thousands of feathers to be sorted, dyed and then individually glued in place by hand. As the Buckbeak on show at the Studio Tour is more than 12 years old now, it’s important to refresh and replenish his coat as the glue wears and feathers come loose when he bows.”

Feathery facts:

• Buckbeak’s coat consists of thousands of real goose and chicken feathers which were individually airbrushed with dye in order to create an authentic layered effect.
• It took Val and 20 artists one whole year to fully coat the three Hippogriff animatronics, as each feather was individually inserted by hand and then glued into place.
• The Buckbeak model seen in Hagrid’s pumpkin patch in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was an animatronic; his wings, neck, eyes and beak all moved. In other scenes, the Hippogriff was created digitally by the Visual Effects team and the cast were given props – such as a beak on a stick – to interact with on set.
• As well as working with Buckbeak Val also spent her time with some of the other feathered creatures from the Harry Potter films including Fawkes and Hedwig.

This April visitors to Warner Bros. Studio Tour London – The Making of Harry Potter are invited to discover how filmmakers brought feathered creatures to life on screen and created the illusion of flight on the sets of the most successful film series of all time.  As part of the three-week feature, Featherologist Val Jones will lead an expert team to demonstrate the techniques that made winged wonders such as Buckbeak the Hippogriff and Fawkes the Phoenix a reality on screen.

The Studio Tour’s Feathers and Flight feature will run from Friday 4th April to Sunday 27th April 2014. All extra activities are included in the ticket price.

In addition to the exciting news about the brand new Harry Potter UK children’s editions, we have a Q&A with new illustrator Jonny Duddle to share.

How did you feel when you found out you would be illustrating the new Harry Potter jackets?
It was a bit of a shock. I painted the first cover as a ‘test’ piece last year, but was concerned that I couldn’t give it the time I would’ve liked due to other commitments. So when I heard that J.K. Rowling and the team at Bloomsbury wanted me to paint the rest of the series, I was gobsmacked. And then I worried that I just wasn’t qualified for the job, having only read the first book years ago. I felt like an impostor, amongst millions of Harry Potter fans. A proper Muggle. But then I realised that this gives me a fresh perspective, and I’m hugely excited to work my way through the wonderful books, reading each one as I produce artwork brimming with fantastic creatures and unforgettable characters.

Is there a particular character or scene that you are looking forward to putting on the jackets?
I’ve been briefed on all of the jackets, and in most cases I’ve been given a couple of options. I haven’t actually read all of the books, so I can only be excited by what I’ve read, or the brief for each cover. I’m working on the cover for The Prisoner of Azkaban at the moment, and I’m having a lot of fun drawing a key element of that book. I love drawing characters, creatures and animals, so every cover gives me scope for something new and exciting.

How do you as an artist approach such a large job? Where do you begin with such a wide range of possibilities?
I’m taking one book at a time. I read the cover brief, and then I read the story, making notes and occasional sketches. I collect references, from my library of non-fiction books, search online and take my own photographs. I’ve recruited my neighbours’ son, who is suitably Potter-esque, although he annoyingly had his slightly wild hair cut for the new school term. I make numerous sketches of the main elements of the cover and then cobble them all together digitally, until I have a cover rough I feel happy to send to Bloomsbury and J.K. Rowling. I hear back very quickly with comments on my rough, which I then tweak or redraw until everyone’s happy for me to progress. Then I ‘paint’ each cover digitally.

Are you a Harry Potter fan? If so, what are your first memories of reading the books?
I am now very much a Harry Potter fan. I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone a few years ago, and I bought a boxed set with the intention of reading all of the books. But I’ve had a very busy few years with my career as an illustrator and writer and, along with a young family and late nights in my studio, I just don’t read as much as I would like, and nowhere near as much as I used to. And as a country bumpkin with no cinemas nearby, I’d never seen the Harry Potter films. I saw the first one at the cinema, after I read the book, but that’s it. In some ways that probably makes me unusual, and I think it’s a good place from which to approach the world of Hogwarts and Harry Potter, without any preconceptions. I’m reading each book in turn and immediately developing the cover, taking the images that are conjured up in my head by J.K. Rowling’s magical words.

Who is your favourite character from the Harry Potter universe?
I love Hagrid. I like his bumbling, well-meaning nature and how things often go wrong because of something he’s said or done or his general clumsiness, in spite of his best intentions. In that way he reminds me of myself. When I was briefed on the first cover, he was the first character I tried to draw. I also like Arthur Weasley because he likes tinkering with old cars (like my dad used to), and I like his approach to his job at the Ministry, as a slightly naughty and mild-mannered rebel.

What were your favourite books as a child?
As a very young child it was Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. Then I was obsessed with Roald Dahl, and I’m still in love with his books, having just finished reading all of them with my eight-year-old daughter. As I got older I became a bit of a fantasy nut. I started high school in 1981, and was a huge fan of the new ‘fighting fantasy’ series, beginning with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. I remember mapping out the book on a long roll of printer paper my dad brought home from work, and painstakingly copying each illustration from the book on to the map in the appropriate location. I read The Hobbit in my last year at primary school, which is still one of my favourite books, and then The Lord of the Rings in my first year (or two?) at secondary school. I felt a connection with J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, because the environments of Middle Earth seemed to echo the environments in which I grew up and explored on my bike, amongst the hills that form the border between England and Wales, with the rolling valleys beneath and the dark, foreboding peaks of Snowdonia visible in the distance.

Who are your favourite illustrators (either classic or modern)?
I’m an avid collector of books, and now have hundreds weighing down the sagging floorboards of my studio. Going back to my favourite book when I was little, I’m still inspired by the late Maurice Sendak, and was blown away by the documentary Tell Them Anything You Want, in which he talked about his life and inspirations. The first illustrator I remember being directly inspired by was Brian Froud, after watching a piece on television whilst on holiday in the Lake District when I was ten years old, about his development process on The Dark Crystal. As a student I obsessed over the Golden Age illustrators, in particular Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac and W. Heath Robinson. I also enjoy independent comics and I loved Jamie Hewlett’s work on Tank Girl, and everything he’s done with Gorillaz in recent years. Modern favourites are diverse, from children’s book illustrators like Shaun Tan and Chris Riddell, lowbrow painter Glenn Barr and a host of movie concept artists (and illustrators) such as Peter De Seve, Nico Marlet and Carter Goodrich.

How would you describe your own art style?
I think I have a number of ‘styles’. The illustrations I’m creating for Harry Potter are very different to the artwork in my picture books, which are probably what I’m best known for. Before becoming an illustrator, I worked for eight years as a concept artist in computer games, and I recently spent almost four years working with Aardman, as one of the character designers on their stop-motion movie The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! As a concept artist you have to be thick-skinned, as drawings are tossed aside with barely a glance form your art director and open-minded with style and subject matter. I worked on games that were cartoony, realistic and sometimes almost abstract, producing thousands of drawings in pencil and on computer whilst developing a digital toolset that’s been carried over into my illustration work. On computer I work in a very similar way to my techniques with real paint, progressing from a sketch to a finished drawing, laying an under-painting and then working on a final layer of colour. I love the flexibility that digital artwork gives me to change the direction of a painting and move elements around at any stage.

The common threads, however stylised or realistic, are probably my desire to emphasise character, drop in some vivid colours and a tendency to cram as much as I can into an illustration. These work well in my picture books, but often have to be tempered a little with book jackets, particularly for older readers.

You are well-known for your picture books. Is it easier to come up with ideas for a full book or a single jacket?
My picture books evolve over many months, or sometimes years, with the words and pictures feeding each other until an idea becomes more solid. I only illustrate my own picture books, so the writing is intimately connected to the artwork and a book idea might stem from a single sketch or a single sentence. The illustrations can’t be ‘wrong’ because everything’s coming from me. Creating an illustration for a book cover is very different. It involves reading some else’s story and trying to understand their vision, so in many ways that can be more difficult. And with Harry Potter, the scenes I’m illustrating have been illustrated before, dissected, discussed and analysed by millions of fans, and made into incredibly successful movies. I’ve not been party to everything that has come before, so I’m creating my interpretation of J.K. Rowling’s words. Hopefully, my illustrations will find new fans, readers will enjoy them and be attracted to them, and I will bring something new to the Harry Potter universe.

What tips would you offer to young people who are keen to become artists/illustrators?
I think anyone can become an artist or illustrator. I don’t believe in ‘talent’ in art, just the desire to practise. If you practise every day, you’ll get better every day. The younger you are when you start practising, the sooner you will begin to feel confident in your abilities. There is such a wonderful diversity in children’s book illustration today, and a few hours in a bookshop or library can reveal artists working in all manner of styles, techniques and mediums. If you find a selection of artists you like, study their work and try and create something similar you can learn a lot.

Most of the artists I’ve met and admire are never particularly happy with their work, and are constantly experimenting and striving to improve. Being an illustrator is the best job in the world, but also one of the hardest jobs in the world. Drawing and colouring-in is actually really difficult, even for professional artists, and you can spend whole days getting nowhere. But the more you practise, the better you get and the more comfortable you get with your own artistic voice.

Do you have a daily routine when it comes to illustrating?
My daily routine is constructed around my two young children. My wife leaves for work at 7.30am, so first thing it’s toast, porridge and packed lunches, then school uniform and sparkly-teeth inspection, followed by the school run, before I can get into my studio. By ‘school run’, I mean ‘running to school’, because my eldest daughter wants to be at the front of the line in the playground and I have to chase after her to give her a kiss on the cheek. We live in a very small village in North Wales, so the school is only fifty yards away and with my studio window open I can hear the children playing outside. I try and take a walk down the lane at lunchtime, which is often the perfect time for inspiration and mulling over the day’s artistic problems. I work until I have to pick up the girls, which can be anytime between 3.00 p.m. and 5.30 p.m. Then I’m usually back at the drawing board once I’ve read some stories and the children are fast asleep in bed.