"42 Years of making professional Art . . . . . ."

"A minimum of 400 million people have held his art in their hands" since his first book cover for Puffin Books in 1973 by one fan's calculation and there's no way to calculate how many tv, movie, games consoles and other media consumers have viewed it on screens, let lone held his book cover art in their hands on every continent."

The "Legendary" Illustrator . . . . . ." (Role Player magazine)
He can't remember how many copies of Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf and other Role-play gamebooks carried his cover Art. Millions certainly. Or how many authors got larger royalty cheques as a result of his involvement. Or exactly on what date it was that he discovered Science Fiction books with his cover Art quadrupled their sales, causing W.H.Smith, Britain's leading book retailer to "take any book that has a P.A.J. cover". Despite the accolades heaped on him by clients and fans alike, the former mainly due to his skill at accelerating the sales of books, the latter to do with the Art itself, "that was then, and this is now" and his personal focus has always simply been on "striving always to be a more skilled Artist"; that, and a desire since the age of twelve, when he made his first handmade publication from cut up school essay books, to be "self-published".

"Back to (future) basics . . . . . ." And so it was, in the late 90's he closed his famous Design and Licensing Company based in Wimbledon, Solar Wind Limited, and it's Copyrights licensing division "The Solar Wind Picture Library" both of which had clients as far apart as Tokyo and Los Angeles and all major geographical locations in-between, and decided to evolve and develop "The Solar Wind name" as part of a suite of visual "properties" grouped together to make cohesive the various genres and business activities he had experience of.

He moved the studio from London to rural Shropshire to what is officially designated "an area of outstanding natural beauty" in the depths of England's countryside known as "The Marches", on the edge of an old Roman Road not far from a cave said to contain Merlin, still alive, walled-up by Morgana le Fay, to open a studio literally at the foot of the Long Mynd Hills, where birds of prey circle over the wood at the rear of the studio, Sheep graze by the hundreds, and the landscape is inspirational.

PETER ANDREW JONES
Studio

"Decidedly Different"

Here, an "Atelier" was set-up, where artworks - ranging from originals to handmade limited edition books and multimedia works and Artist-signatured-greeting cards - are individually designed and created in the studio, workshop and print room (as before the industrial revolution, when Artists interfaced with their public on a personal basis) producing extremely high-quality hand-crafted up-scale works which are sold direct to collectors, both on-line and through a finite number of carefully selected retail outlets, individually chosen for their very high levels of quality service to collectors and buyers.

These works are also then made available for the wider retail market through licensing of the images.

On any one day a studio conversation might centre at least as much on Renaissance Painting techniques and Publishing Schedules as it might on Photoshop or html syntax but whatever the topic the focus is, exclusively, on utter quality, innovation, originality and that sheer dash that also drives his famous Science Fiction Cover Art. His Publishing Company's works hold their own with any Global Publishing organisation but with one distinct unsurpassable difference - each and every item is utterly hand crafted to the highest possible level.

"Self-exacting standards" . . .
Now he paints rural scenes simply because he lives in the midst of such inspiring countryside. Science Fiction remains very much "in his blood" however and his first self-published book was "SOLAR WIND - No known substance", the first of a number of books showcasing his Fantastical Art, and his company now publishes both his historically known and contemporary imaginative Fantasy works such as his illustrated novel "Crux Millennium" with its attendant print series, masterworks, often detailed with real Gold and rare pigments such as lapis lazuli, an extremely rare and expensive pigment from antiquity. He now also pursues his aviation art, which is what he'd originally intended to do before fame as a Science Fiction Artist dragged him off-course, and he spends equal amounts of time between genres spanning urban art, rural art, 60's retro works, science fiction and fantasy, aviation art and figurative, while liaising with a string of carefully selected retail stockists and his partner licensing agency, MGL.
Though self-published, he still entertains client-commissions where the projects are exciting enough to warrant temporary deviation from his publishing and licensing pusuits.