It was while working on The Lord of The Ring's film trilogy as an effects technician that Freya Blackwood decided she wanted to branch out into book illustration.
Her job was to pour latex and airbrush paint the prosthetic Hobbit feet, but she was always looking over the shoulders of the film set illustrators.
"I wanted to get back to something smaller," says Blackwood of her decision to return to Orange, in central NSW, and take up drawing. "You do such a tiny piece of a big film production and with books it's such a lovely, creative, intimate thing." 
Blackwood, who has no formal art training, hasn't looked back since her first collaboration with leading children's author Libby Gleeson, Amy & Louis, won a Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year in 2007. She is one of the few Australians to ever win the international Kate Greenaway Award.
Now three of her children's books, two of them co-authored with Gleeson, a three-times CBCA winner, have scooped this year's awards announced on Friday in Melbourne ahead of the launch of Children's Book Week.
It's the first time in the awards' 69-year history that a single creator has been honoured three times in the same year.
Gleeson and Blackwood's Go to Sleep, Jessie! took out top honours in the Early Childhood category for the heart warming story of a sister who must find a way to comfort her crying toddler sister.
In the Younger Readers section, judges praised Gleeson's perfectly measured prose and Blackwood's beautiful pencil and watercolour illustrations in The Cleo Stories: The Necklace and The Present, and predicted young girls would come to adore the plucky six-year-old heroine and her creative solutions to family dilemmas.
Blackwood's collaboration with Irena Kobald, My Two Blankets, about a young refugee, newly arrived in Australia, who is unable to speak English, was named Picture Book of the Year.
In a strong year for young adolescent fiction, top honours for Older Readers also went to Claire Zorn's The Protected, about a 15-year-old girl coming to terms with the death of her older sister Katie. Historical themes dominated The Eve Pownall Award for Information Books, won by Simon Barnard's A-Z of Convicts in Van Diemen's Land.
The prize-winning books were chosen from a pool of more than 400 entries. Margot Hillel , the council's national chair, said the representation of first-time authors and illustrators and depth of experienced writers stood well for the future of children's literature in Australia.
Gleeson and Blackwood are friends as well as professional book creators. The Cleo Stories grew out of Gleeson's memories of her two now grown-up girls at play. Ivy, Blackwood's nine-year-old daughter, also inspired the illustrations and Gleeson's text.
"Ivy is my brilliant reference matter," says Blackwood. "I don't know what I'm going to do when she out grows childhood."
In her hand-drawn illustrations, Blackwood uses colour and line to draw out the emotional complexity of growing up. It's the tender-sweet stories, those that make her "skin buzz and tingle" on first reading, that she accepts as book projects.
"I'm lucky. I love drawing people and emotional connections, which is why I like family stories and those about the bonds between mothers and fathers and children. Libby and I have similar ideas of family and relationships."
Gleeson aims to create simple and elegant text. "You can never write to win awards, there are seven or eight judges and there is nothing predictable in their judgements to my point of view. You need to remain true to the story."
2015 CBCA AWARD WINNERS
Winner: The Protected, Claire Zorn (UQP)
Honour Books: Nona & Me, Claire Atkins (Black Inc)
The Minnow, Diana Sweeney (Text Publishing)
Younger Readers:
Winner: The Cleo Stories: The Necklace and The Present Libby Gleeson, Freya Blackwood
Honour Books: Two Wolves, Tristan Bancks (Random House Australia)
Withering-by-Sea: a Stella Montgomery Intrigue, Judith Rossell (ABC Books / HarperCollins)
Early Childhood:
Winner: Go to Sleep, Jessie! Libby Gleeson, Freya Blackwood (Little Hare, Hardie Grant Egmont)
Honour Books: Scary Night, Lesley Gibbes, Stephen Michael King (Working Title)
Noni the Pony Goes to the Beach, Alison Lester (Allen & Unwin)
PICTURE BOOK OF THE YEAR:
Winner: My Two Blankets, Freya Blackwood, Text Irena Kobald (Little Hare, Hardie Grant Egmont)
Honour Books: One Minute's Silence, Michael Camilleri , Text David Metzenthen (Allen & Unwin)
The Stone Lion Ritva Voutila , Text Margaret Wild (Little Hare, Hardie Grant Egmont)
EVE POWNALL AWARD FOR INFORMATION BOOKS
Winner: A-Z of Convicts in Van Diemen's Land, Simon Barnard (Text)
Honour Books:Tea and Sugar Christmas, Jane Jolly, Robert Ingpen (National Library of Australia Publishing)
Audacity: Stories of Heroic Australians in Wartime, Carlie Walker (Department of Veterans' Affairs)