Cathy's Art Diary

Delightful exhibition at the House of Illustration looking at the work of the cartoonist/graphic novelist Posy Simmmonds. I’ve been a Posy Simmonds fan since her work on the Guardian Women’s Page and have all the novels so it was wonderful to revisit her work and see her gentle satire of British life. I was laughing out loud from the first cartoon I read! It was lovely to see her childhood drawings which already parodied school friend style magazines and the show showed how her style changed as printing methods developed. It looked at her books for children as well and included a sketchbook for her book about the old Cat “Fred”. The last room was dedicated to her latest book “Cassandra Darke” and had the complete layout around the walls with lots of sketchbooks and preliminary drawings to show how the ideas developed. This was the first book she had produced digitally but it was reassuring to see that all the drawings were still hand done and her husband still typesets...

Fascinating book talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival with Posy Simmonds talking about the process of writing her latest book “Cassandra Darke”.   Posy gave an illustrated talk on how the book evolved from early sketches saying how you started to give your characters clothes in in this case how Cassandra’s trappers hat isolates her from weather and the world. She told us how she draws the floorplans of characters and sketches their interiors so that she can see the characters in them.   Her sketches were art works in their own right regardless of how they are then used in the book. She talked about taking long bus rides to find locations for the book and how she uses those rides to look at people who she then sketches when she gets home.   She said she was taught to draw by looking. She told us how she works in crayon and paint and writes the story in long hand. Her husband then sets that text in speech bubbles. The event was cle...