For an author fascinated by nature, and whose beloved picture books feature innumerable animals and landscapes, Alison Lester’s studio is exactly as idyllic as you would imagine. Her drafting table – covered by paint palettes, brushes and sketches – overlooks the greenery of her garden and steps that lead up to a paddock where her four ponies Lily, Honey, Tom and Sailor graze. Nearby, two guinea fowl have the run of the place.

It is here, in her art-filled home at Nar Nar Goon, a town an hour south-east of Melbourne, that the doyenne of Australian children’s literature does most of her illustrating. “I hardly ever draw when I’m outside,” she says. “I tend to just be out there [in nature] and then remember it … and then I do my version of it.”

One wall of her studio is lined with art. Some pieces were collected from various trips over the decades – a linocut from South America, a watercolour from Mount Sonder in the Northern Territory – while others are the fruits of her prolific four-decade career. There is an original illustration from her wonderful 2013 book Kissed by the Moon, of a baby smiling among flowers. In a corner hangs a broad-brimmed watermelon hat, which appears in both Are We There Yet?, an account of a family road trip around Australia, and the 1990 classic Magic Beach.

Four of the 50-odd books authored by Lester – who was one of Australia’s first children’s laureates – are finalists in Guardian Australia’s best children’s picture book poll. “I would be happy to have one, but to have four seems to be a bit of a miracle,” she says.

The week we meet, Lester has just returned from a trip to South Gippsland, where she has a small gallery and gift shop in the town of Fish Creek. Lester grew up nearby, on a farm by the sea; her bucolic childhood was immortalised in her 1992 picture book My Farm.

Since she was a girl, her family has spent summers at Walkerville South, a stretch of coastline near Wilsons Promontory now synonymous with Magic Beach – a tradition Lester, who now has nine grandchildren, has continued.

The much-loved picture book came about after Lester’s editor at Allen & Unwin visited Walkerville. “She said after a couple of days: ‘You should do a book about this place, because you obviously love it.’

“It’s very wild and woolly. It’s on the edge of Bass Strait, so you get big storms coming through. But I guess it’s like any place that you know so well, that you’ve been wandering around since you were a little kid, that you have your favourite little spots.”

Originally, the story of Magic Beach centred on a girl called Meg, who believes there is a mermaid at the beach. “I still really love that story,” Lester says. “It’s got a very sweet ending.” But her editor suggested broadening the focus, which yielded the book’s collective chorus, imagining adventures “at our beach, our magic beach”.

Though Magic Beach has sold more than 500,000 copies and been adapted into a 2024 feature film, its popularity was a slow burn, Lester says. The book’s eventual success made her “more confident that I was on the right track, that I could do the books that resonated with me and they were going to be OK”.

“[I hear from] people who had it when they were children, and now their kids have it. I’ll probably get on to three generations soon,” she says.

Lester suspects that the book’s quintessentially Australian subject matter – the coastal idyll of summers spent “surfing and splashing and jumping the waves” – has had something to do with its enduring success locally. “Of all the books, it hasn’t been translated many times. Imagine got maybe 20 translations, but Magic Beach hasn’t travelled very far. I think it’s very Aussie.”

Inside Lester’s studio, her ginger cat Kaos has emerged, but skitters when Poppy, a rambunctious young jack russell, bounds into the room. The animals Lester lives with often make their way into her work; Poppy’s predecessor, Bigsy, had a dedicated book published in 2022. “I probably draw horses and dogs and cats the most,” Lester says.

The distinctive style of her illustrations is instantly recognisable – softly grainy pencil drawings of cheerful characters and animals. “I think everything I do looks a little bit like a stuffed toy,” she says.

Her initial sketches are done by hand, with a 2B or 6B pencil, and then photocopied on to watercolour paper. “I’ve tried to be a digital artist, but I’m really just terrible at it,” Lester says. “I generally have a pretty good idea about what I want to draw before I start.” For the big spreads in Imagine – a book of immersive vistas of different parts of the natural world – it was “a matter of fitting as many animals in as I could”.

Though she usually works from her studio, she’s ready to improvise whenever and wherever the inspiration strikes. Once, on a flight home from Perth, she had an idea for what the child in Kissed by the Moon could look like: “All I could find to draw on was the air sick bag.” That vomit bag is now held in the archives of the National Centre for Australian Children’s Literature.

The concept for Kissed by the Moon came to her the night of a full moon. “I was running through this dappled moonlight, and I thought: this is kind of like being kissed by the moon,” she says.

“From then, I thought about all the different things the natural world could give to your child and how in many ways they’re much more valuable than anything you can buy.”

Books about the family – Magic Beach, Are We There Yet?, My Farm – are close to her heart, she says. But, like a parent admitting to having a preferred child, Lester confesses that Kissed by the Moon is her favourite.

Lester’s career as a children’s author began in 1985 with the publication of Clive Eats Alligators, after a year working as a secondary art teacher and several as an illustrator for other authors’ books. More than 40 years later, she is now completing the final instalment in the series: Nicky Catches Koalas, in which children travel around the world helping endangered animals.

On her studio desk is a large storyboard of sketches collaged with masking tape. The characters’ adventure starts in Australia: one spots a greater glider, another makes a frog sauna, a third releases zoo-bred numbats into the wild. “Correct tail,” reads an annotation on a drawing of a northern quoll; Lester sent it to a conservationist for checking.

“I have been working on this for easily 10 years,” Lester says. “I’ve been having a lovely time drawing sloths and Mexican wolves and white seahorses and finding out all these fabulous things people are doing to help them.

“I love the natural world and being part of it.”

• You can vote once a day in Guardian Australia’s poll to decide the best Australian children’s picture book. The winner will be announced at 6am on 6 February