Sheep worth their weight in silver and gold for 2015

Wuon-Gean Ho with a coin template. [Provided to China Daily]

Even though she grew up in the UK, she says she is fascinated by Asian art and has traveled across Asia, visiting countries including China, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.

"I think the Asian way of creating things and looking at things is very much embedded in my landscapes. When you go to a country and breathe the air and eat the food, it changes your outlook on life."

As a former vet, she has become familiar with sheep, particularly when they gave birth.

"In that role, I sometimes had to wait for hours for the birth to happen, and during this time I sat and watched the sheep, observing its physical characteristics and unique attributes."

That experience made it relatively easy to make a design featuring sheep, she says.

One of Ho's original designs was a ewe and its lamb, which looks very different from the finished design. She was originally going to inscribe the yang character on the forehead of the ewe but felt this had religious connotations and may look "too Western".

Designing the sheep and transforming it onto the coin required some adjustments, one being to make the sheeps' eyes bigger, as they normally appear much smaller when depicted on a coin, she says.

Ho says one challenge in the design process was to work with a circular design, because she normally produces square-shaped drawings. Another challenge was to make sure the trees in the background show up well, and that the character yang is legible, so seven trees she drew originally had to be reduced to four.

Last year, Ho's equine design featured a powerful leaping horse with a big tail high in the wind.

The sheep coin design is featured on a number of different coins, made from either 999.9 fine gold or 999 fine silver. The range includes gold and silver coins in five ounce, one ounce and tenth of an ounce.

The range also includes kilo coins, both in gold and silver and weighing one kilogram each, which are the first lunar kilo coins introduced, and are presented in elegant Chinese-inspired packaging.

The Royal Mint is 1,100 years old, but since 2010 it has operated as Royal Mint Ltd, a company that has an exclusive contract with HM Treasury to supply all coins for Britain. It is fully owned by the UK Treasury.

Each coin the mint produces is given a set mintage, which is the maximum number of coins to be produced, and determines how collectable the coin is.

Feeney says after the mintage is set, 40 percent of this is made immediately, and as sales increase, more are made, until total mintage is achieved.

The year-of-the-horse coin has almost sold out, he says, and he hopes the year-of-the-sheep coin will sell just as well.