t’s been ten years since author and illustrator Jane Hissey last created an Old Bear book and he’s worryingly absent from her latest release, Ruby, Blue and Blanket.

I’m concerned the hero of thousands of childhood bedtimes (including my own) may have been – gulp – retired.

“Absolutely not!” retorts Hissey. “He’s very well and I dare say will make a comeback one of these days.”

But she has recently switched to a new publisher – Brighton’s Salariya – and welcomed her first grandchild. It was time for a new chapter in an illustrious career that has included scores of the much-loved children’s books and a BAFTA-winning TV series.

“It seemed a good idea to try something new before I was completely typecast,” she laughs.

The new book marks the arrival of a cast of new characters, made by Hissey and drawn from life just as Old Bear was.

The impression, as ever, is of an enchanted toy box; one feels one could reach out and touch the rabbit’s velvet fur or stroke the horse’s felt saddle.

Hissey is renowned for mocking up miniature tableaux of each scene, giving a distinctly lifelike quality to her coloured pencil illustrations.

The 61-year-old studied illustration at what was then Brighton Art College under tutors including John Vernon Lord and Raymond Briggs. She remains close friends with many from those days who, like Hissey, have chosen to remain in Sussex.

“We forget now they were tutors and we were students. There’s a very close knit community of illustrators around here.”

After a stint teaching art at Worthing Sixth Form College, she became an author by chance, when a publisher from Random House stumbled across one of her greetings card designs and approached her to write a book. Things moved very quickly and Hissey soon found herself in much demand.

“It was amazing. I was incredibly lucky to be there in the boom years when picture books were really taking off. It was terribly exciting and fast-moving. We went from books to TV and merchandise in a very short space of time.”

Returning to children’s books after a ten-year hiatus has been a challenge. It’s hard, she says, to reinvent yourself when you’re so well-known for one character.

“That’s why I chose to write this new book in verse. And I made the illustrations very bright. I wanted to ring the changes.”

Hissey used to fit her writing around her children, drawing while they slept.

This time around, she threw herself into it wholesale, only stopping for her daily walk near the home she shares with her illustrator husband Ivan in Hadlow Down on the fringes of Wilderness Woods. There was no time for what she laughingly calls “artistic moments”

although she did have to take some extreme measures to combat her predilection for procrastination.

“I’ve been known to drive the car to a very quiet spot where there are no distractions and write there. When I was working on ideas for this book, I took a flask of tea and parked in a pretty car park not far from here and spent the day there in my car.”

While publishing has changed dramatically over the course of Hissey’s career – “No one quite knows where children’s publishing is going at the moment” – she believes her audience remains much the same. “Pre-schoolers still like tea parties and treasure hunts and making things and hiding things and wearing clothes in funny ways. The same things make them laugh.”

She should know. Being a granny is “terribly exciting,” she says, and has given her new inspiration to write. Has she already eyed up a new generation of toys to immortalise, I wonder? “I may put some of my granddaughter’s toys into a book although I’m not sure really…there’s an awful lot of plastic these days!”

Jane Hissey’s Ruby, Blue and Blanket is out now, published by Book House and priced £10.