By Claire Hines, Year 11
On Thursday, December the first, renowned graphic artist and novelist Posy Simmonds came to our school and shared about her profession to year 11 and year 12 English classes. She was in Geneva to receive the Grand Prix Töpffer for her work and agreed to come to our establishment as she was in the city. She has written over thirty graphic novels of which her most successful is “Tamara Drewe” first published in 2005.
During her presentation, she showed us sketches done in her childhood and displayed her first cartoons done for various British newspapers including the “Times”, the “Cosmopolitan” and the “Guardian”.
Mrs. Simmonds started out doing monochrome cartoons, and used color for the first time in her first graphic novel: “True love”. In this novel, she was offered the use of a third color besides black and white and chose pink. She informed the students that the use of color was both a delight and a challenge at the beginning, but turned out really well in the end.
She said that during a visit to Italy over the summer a few years later, at the time when she was looking for ideas for her first serial for the “Guardian”, she saw a woman enter the café where she was sitting. Apparently, the woman sat down sighing and made her husband light her cigarette and order for her, before ignoring him completely as she sighed away amidst her piles of shopping. This woman reminded Mrs. Simmonds of the protagonist of Flaubert’s: “Madame Bovary” which she had studied at school, and inspired her to make her serial into a modernization of “Madame Bovary”, called “Gemma Bovery”. She showed us her first sketches of the characters for this serial, most of them inspired by real people. For instance, she based Gemma’s face on Princess Diana’s, and the Boulanger on a man she had met in a pub in Brittany while visiting the northwest coast of France.
She explained that before starting any serial or graphic novel, she would make several attempts at drawing her characters with different hair colors, faces, and clothes until she got them just the
way she wanted them. Once she had decided on their appearance she would design their wardrobe, and draw them in diverse poses and in various settings. She showed us some of these initial drawings and compared them to the final result.
She then talked about the setting and explained that when starting her most famous serial “Tamara Drewe” which is set in Dover, she did watercolors of the countryside to get used to drawing it. She then started reproducing these paintings over and over again until she could do so without difficulty.
Later, when asked if she had any advice for students interested in becoming writers or artists, she answered practice. The more you draw, the easier it is to use your pencil to achieve the picture you want, and the better the latter becomes. It is the same with writing. The more you do it, the better you get at it and the easier it becomes.
