By now you will know that I’m creating a space adventure trilogy for 8-12 year olds.

The action takes place at the International Space School, which I have set in a green and mountainous area of Wales – one of the countries that makes up the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

I’ll need an illustration of the school for the book but I also need it for myself to really get a feel for the place. It is a fantasy landscape, but based on experience – places I’ve been and lived in.

They say that abstract, concept art is finished when it most closely resembles the idea the artist first had. So it is with illustrating a scene from a story you have written yourself.

Towards the end of the painting, I realised I’d become a bit obsessed with certain aspects of the drawing and had not really got the whole thing to come together. I made the smaller buildings quite eco – with sedum/turf roofs, but that makes it look too 20th century.

I think it needs to be more contemporary, so I need to go back and do more research. You don’t know these things unless you do them! I’ll come back with another version when I’ve done it and am happy.

This is probably the biggest illustration in the book and needs to be got right. I think it needs to go twice as wide – a big wide landscape – so it fits across the bottom of a page – maybe even across the preliminary pages – in fact hold that thought!