AMY Husband never dreamed, when she was doodling letters to her boyfriend while at university, that they would one day land her a publishing deal. But to call them letters is a bit of an injustice. They’re little works of art.

Her aim was to tell her childhood sweetheart, James, about the everyday things that were happening in her life.

But being an artist, she illustrated them, too – in her trademark bold, bright colours.

‘Dear Jimmy’ starts a typical letter telling her boyfriend about the underwear she saw drying on a neighbour’s washing line. Brightly-coloured knickers are drawn against a deep yellow background.

There were “frilly ones, lacy ones, spotty ones, stripy ones,” she wrote next to the drawing before signing off “Love, Amy xx.”

She and James met at Woldgate School in Pocklington. Now they share a house in Elvington. “We’ve been together 12 years,” the 26-year-old says. “Crazy!”

She has always loved art. “It was always my favourite thing at school.”

She also liked thinking up stories.

“When I was small I always had a folder where I had lots of little stories I had made up.”

So it seemed natural she’d go on to study art. Those letters to her boyfriend were written while she was reading graphic art at Liverpool John Moores University. “I was just telling him what I had been doing that day, with little drawings on,” Amy says.

After she graduated in 2006, she included some of the letters in the portfolio she sent off to publishers – lots of publishers. Children’s book publisher Meadowside wrote back. “They said: ‘Come and see us with your folder’. And they really liked the idea of the letters.”

The result was her first book, Dear Miss, about a mischievous boy called Michael, his dog Bruno – and the endless excuses Michael comes up with for not going back to school after the holidays.

Written in the form of a series of letters to his teacher, it amounts to one increasingly implausible excuse after another. Michael, imagination working overtime, claims to have been recruited by the secret service and sent on a mission to Egypt and then Mount Everest to rescue an explorer.

Before long, he’s running into pirates, searching for buried treasure on the Amazon – and even flying to the moon.

“Dear Miss,” Michael writes. “I’ve got some good news and some bad news. We caught the pirate king trying to steal a rocket! Bruno and I stopped him though. Now for the bad news. I’m not going to be coming back ever. I’m really disappointed (especially about the science test). NASA want me to go on a space mission…”

The words capture the cheeky inventiveness of a little boy who cannot bear the thought of being cooped up in school again after the holidays. But it is the pictures that make the book: wonderfully quirky, imaginative and brightly coloured.

Bruno has a long, questing snout, patchwork eyes and expressive ears.

Michael is a kind of Dennis The Menace character, with a striped T-shirt and blond, curly hair. When they hire an aeroplane, the picture takes up most of two pages, as does an Amazonian swamp populated with snakes and crocodiles.

Minor characters peer in from the edges of the page, or appear only as disembodied feet or legs hanging down from the top.

Children loved the book. Published in May last year, Dear Miss has just won the 2010 ‘Read It Again’ Cambridgeshire Children’s Picture Book Award, voted on by 4,500 children in schools and libraries across Cambridgeshire.

When she attended the awards ceremony, she was mobbed by excited children.

“The children were all crowded around me, and wanted me to sign copies,” she says, a delighted smile on her face. “There was a little girl saying: ‘Oh! I really wanted to meet you’.”

It was the same when she did readings in primary schools in and around Pocklington.

“A boy was saying: ‘That’s a brilliant book!’, which was really sweet.”

She has an obvious rapport with young children. “I like spending time with them. They are funny.” That is all the more interesting, since neither she nor any of her close or extended family have young children themselves. So where does she get her ideas, and her characters, from?

Michael, she says, is based on her cousin. “When we were little he had big, blond, curly hair and was very mischievous.”

She often uses people she knows when searching for inspiration for characters, she admits. The “very important man from Nasa” on the spaceship page of Dear Miss, for example, looks “a lot like my Dad”.

She readily admits she still has something of the child in her herself – you can see that in the studio she shares with fellow artist Mark Hearld, above a shop in Bootham. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a mess. A creative, brightly coloured mess: but a mess nevertheless – and that is after she has done some tidying up.

Her ideas seem to be equally creative and yet haphazard. “Some of the things I draw, kids picking their nose, that kind of thing, I think, ‘What am I doing?’ Where do I get these ideas from?’”

The answer is that she just tries to remember what it was like being a child.

“And I try to think about things from a kids’ perspective.” She is also a passionate collector of children’s books. “They are so colourful, so playful and humorous.”

And what about children of her own?

Would she like to have some one day?

“Definitely!” she says. And then she adds, with the lack of guile that is her trademark: “I’m intrigued to find out whether it would give me more ideas. I think it might be quite good for getting ideas.”

• Dear Miss by Amy Husband is published by Meadowside, priced £5.99. It is now up for a second award, in Sheffield, and has been translated into a number of foreign languages, including Danish and Italian.

• Amy’s next book, Dear Santa, which also features Michael and Bruno, is out at the end of October.