June 26, 2017 was a day to remember for Harry Potter fans old and new as it marked 20 years since the iconic Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was first published.

From an idea born on a train journey to its creation in a small café in Edinburgh, JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel started a global phenomenon.

It has sold more than 450 million copies worldwide in 79 languages, inspired a major movie franchise, a spellbinding theatre production and captivated readers of all ages for two decades.

Given all this, being tasked with reimagining the series’ artwork was not an easy task for Flintshire-based illustrator and children’s author Jonny Duddle.

“The people at Bloomsbury had seen some work I’d done on the Pirates of the Caribbean game and they asked me to do a test along with some other illustrators,” explains Jonny as we sit in his Nannerch studio surrounded by books, props and storyboards.

“I originally tried to turn them down because I knew nothing about Harry Potter – I’d never even read any of the books or seen any of the films.

“I work late and only tend to read the books I illustrate so finding the time to read the Harry Potter books was hard, but I was persuaded by the art director and eventually they picked me to do all of them.

“They sent me the books and the audio versions and I had to read them all very quickly!”

Between November 2013 and June 2014 Jonny managed to read all seven of Rowling’s Potter books and watched the eight film adaptations.

In the next three months he drew a new cover, front and back, for each book, and illustrated new presentation boxes.

“I sat there listening to the audio book with a notepad and wrote down any time there was a description of what they looked like,” he explains.

“I ended up with nice long descriptions of each character and actually you can’t go too wrong by looking at the films because they were based on the books.”

Although they never met, Rowling would send notes of what she wanted changing, with Jonny shaping the feedback into his illustrations and sketches.

“All I can really do as an artist is draw my vision,” he says. “I knew what Harry Potter looked like, but by the last book people complained that he looked too young.

“Harry is supposed to be quite small with lots of hair and glasses so you can’t go too far from what Daniel Radcliffe looked like, but I think I made his hair far messier.

“The main problem was that in the films the actors had beefed up by the end!”

Jonny, 46, was born in Lancashire, but now lives and works in the house he grew up in, a sprawling and book-filled rectory in Nannerch, which he and his wife Jane bought from his mother after his father’s death in 2008.

His childhood was a typical mixture of “exploring forests, riding my bike for miles and miles, scrumping apples and building tree-houses” but drawing and writing stories quickly became the focus.

“The reason I started drawing in primary school was because I liked writing stories and drawing the pictures to go with them,” he remembers.

“I went to Stoke Polytechnic and then returned to North Wales and tried to sell paintings on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, but I didn’t do very well.

“I then moved to Bristol to try and find illustration work and ended up working on a pirate ship.”

Jonny spent a year manning the rigging on a real ship used in film and TV shoots before further adventures saw him working as an art teacher in the middle of the Kalahari Dessert, as well as stints as an encyclopedia salesman, a children’s entertainer in Majorca and a gallery warden.

“Eventually I ended up designing characters for computer games,” he says. “I was working in games designing 3D models and then as a concept artist coming up with characters and environments.

“It was very handy and a good way to learn Photoshop so when the internet started up I was well placed and that’s how I started getting professional illustration work.”

It was his experience as a pirate which stayed with him and whilst working as a freelance games artist, Jonny wrote a picture book about a sea monster called The Pirate Cruncher which was published by Templar in 2009.

Then he helped design the characters for Aardman’s stop-motion movie The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!

A second picture book The Pirates Next Door followed, which won the 2012 Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, and it’s Jonny’s pirate books which have made him one of the most read children’s authors around.

With his daughters’ school just 50 yards away, it’s hard to forget the influence his two children have on his work and Jonny agrees they can be his harshest critic.

“My two children are very helpful,” he laughs. “They’re 12 and eight and they’ve been brilliant over the years reading my picture books.

“Daisy, my eldest, has a review in one of them that reads: ‘This is much better than your other books’.

“I make her dummy books and print it out for her so she can read it – when you’re turning the pages in the book it feels so much better than looking at images on a screen.

“It’s not the same and it’s not massively expensive to buy a child a picture book which they might read 20 times. They can get battered and ripped but children can still flick through them whenever they want.”

l Jonny Duddle will be in the Mold Bookshop on Saturday October 21 at 11.30am. Call 01352 759879 for details.