Harry was the first one she'd painted. She'd not been able to forget the look on his face as he spoke with her about his godfather, nor as he'd faced the Death Eaters in the Hall of Prophesy, shielding Ginny with his own body, nor as he'd spoken about murder and mendacity to a room full of skeptical teenagers. She thought he must have been quite lonely, carrying around all that pain and responsibility. He was often on her mind during in those long weeks of summer, and she thought of how he isolated must have felt, grieving in solitude. She knew loneliness well, and thought that if she painted him, helping the two-dimensional Harry through his grief, telling him that it was going to get better, the real Harry—wherever was—might feel a bit lighter somehow. She painted him looking sympathetic, with a faint smile on his face as if he'd just begun to develop affection for her. It ended up helping her to talk to him, in the end.
The next one was Neville, painted shortly after his letter arrived that summer. She could read the loneliness between the lines of his cheerful, newsy letter, speaking about shopping for a new wand, about caring for his absent uncle Algy's herb garden and his thriving Mimbulus mimbletonia and hinting about the newfound pride in his grandmothers voice as she dragged him around to visit her aged friends and show him off. Touched that he had thought of her, Luna painted Neville holding his new wand with quiet pride in his eyes—a testament to his burgeoning sense of self-worth. She found his portrait quite easy to talk to, so much so that by the time she left for school that September, she greeted the real Neville like an old friend, making him stammer and blush and grin widely.
Ginny (predictably enough) was next, painted over Christmas holidays that year. Ginny had always been somewhat kind to her—well, kinder than most anyway—and only grew more so as the years went on. Unlike most people, Ginny was always willing to stop and actually listen to the answer when she asked Luna how she was, which in turn made Luna more willing to open up. When Harry unexpectedly asked Luna to the Christmas party, Ginny was the first person she thought of going to and sharing the news. Luna rather had fun painting all the freckles—it was almost like painting the night sky, and she nearly went a bit overboard in her exuberance. Ginny's portrait was warm and friendly—just like her—and if you looked really closely, she seemed to be glancing over at Harry a bit.
Luna also painted Hermione that winter, even though at times in the past Luna had suspected that Hermione didn't like her much. But when Hermione had come to the bathroom in tears, allowing Luna to see her vulnerable spots and come to her assistance, Luna realized that Hermione, in spite of her brittle exterior, had a warm, passionate heart. So what if she had a limited imagination? Hermione liked facts and rules and boundaries. She could use a friend like Luna to open her mind to the world of mysteries and possibilities. Anyway, Luna liked her, and she thought about the older girl's loneliness as she spent the holidays away from her friends, feeling isolated by the breach between them. So she painted Hermione then—looking determined and intelligent but with a hint of anger and pain in her eyes.
Ron was the last one, and a very difficult subject. Luna had always been drawn to him like a moth to a flame. He was just so vivid, so large and loud and full of heart and bluster, not always aware that he had the capacity to cut deeply. But she saw a different side of him that spring as he was forced to live with his mistakes, as he worried about his family every time the morning newspaper came, (still managing to make a bleak joke to soften the blow he feared) and finally as he fought valiantly with his friends. She painted him with the genuine affection he'd shown her after his illness, and his eyes seemed ready to dart toward Hermione at any moment.
Her portrait friends kept her company the summer after Dumbledore died—that summer where everything seemed to get so bad in a hurry. After the wedding, (where everyone was so nice to her) she linked the portraits with tiny golden threads made up of the word 'friends.' For the first time, she felt that the label was hers to grasp in her hand, and she hoped that if they ever saw the portraits they would be pleased, rather than uncomfortable. That summer, as she tried to imagine how much worse things were going to get, she thought about the five people above her head, and somehow knew that they would help make everything all right in the end.
After the war ended, she went back to her father's house, sifting through the rubble for anything she could salvage of her childhood. Clutching the cracked photograph of her mother to her breast, she was startled to find one of Harry's bright green eyes staring up at her. She picked it up and put it in her bag carefully, rummaging around for the rest of his face. Instead, she found one of Ginny's small, capable freckled hands, both of Hermione's eyebrows, Neville's proud smile, and a tuft of Ron's bright hair.
Later, she kept them in a lacquered box on her dresser, and even though she saw quite enough of the actual people painted, those little bits still felt precious to her. Some day when she had children, she thought might share them, letting her children know that isolation did not always have to be a permanent condition.
There was no point in trying to paint them again, though she was certain that Dean would have been perfectly willing to help her. She suspected that if she'd tried to paint her friends now, she would have needed the ceiling of the Great Hall to contain them.