When I met her a few weeks back, she showed me some (very rough) pencil sketches - nothing more than scribbles really - for the first stab at it. She didn't leave them with me, so I can't show you here, but I can post the ones she sent a week or so later, still in very rough form, but fleshed out a bit more.

Before we look at them, remember the 'remit' that I have given her. The three designs in each set will include:

• one strongly seasonal (although all three will certainly be related to the season)
• one based on traditional Japanese culture
• something based on contemporary life here in Japan

We saw this in the Spring set with 'Full Bloom', 'Doll Festival' and 'Sky Tree' respectively.

Here is the first batch (12 images) that arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago:

Some are self-evident, some may need a bit of elucidation. The cockerel you see is a decoration on a festival cart; two of the scenes with goldfish represent the summer festival children's activity of 'scooping goldfish'. The scenes of tall buildings are an international 'light up' festival that Seki-san had heard of. The one in dark blue/black is intended to be seen as though by person lying on the ground looking up into the trees, where fireflies are flitting around ...

I think we have material here suitable to be worked into our 'Season' and 'Tradition' spots, but nothing for the 'Contemporary' scene. A 'light up' festival isn't what Japan is into just now, and her design - with the tall towers - looks like a retread of our SkyTree image!

I gave her my comments, and nearly two weeks later (!) she sent over this:

It's a scene from a famous theme park located not too far from Mt. Fuji (as you can see). I sat and looked at these for a while, but didn't find that I was very excited about this. I think the concept itself is not so bad, but her realizations of it - even at this clumsy conceptual stage - just don't set me on fire.

But I was a bit hesitant to be 'negative' about what she was doing, and being pretty occupied with a lot of other jobs here, I postponed calling her ...

It seems she 'got the message' though, so she had another go:

Whoopee! This we can do something with! It's summery, it's modern, it's colourful, and it makes fabulous use of our vertical format!

So that's where we sit at the moment. It's the weekend now (my only real chance to speak to her, as her normal day job keeps her pretty well occupied during the week), so she and I will hopefully be nailing down the selection of three sometime today or tomorrow.

I have a pretty clear view now of what the set might look like, but it would certainly be interesting to hear from the viewers too. If you were the series 'editor', what would your decision be at this point?