Seeing the images of her Tolkien work, 45 years after they were painted, Miss Fairburn has felt it necessary to renew some of the works in different ways. The originals were painted mainly in coloured ink, which Miss Fairburn believes to be the most suitable medium for book illustrations, although in some places she has used water-colour and white acrylic. In reviewing images of the original pictures in 2012, Miss Fairburn found that some of them had faded -they were never intended to be framed and hung - and in some of them there were problems only apparent to the eye of the artist. As a result, she has in effect created "new originals" of a number of the images.