Kirsten Sims

South Africa

Kirsten Sims is a visual artist, designer and illustrator who studied Applied Design and Illustration at the Stellenbosch Academy in South Africa. Her paintings have been exhibited in numerous galleries, and her debut picturebook was published in 2016 by Orfeu Negro in Portugal. Kirsten lives and works in Cape Town.

In this post, Kirsten talks about her beautiful debut picturebook, ‘Baltasar O Grande’ (Balthazar the Great). This charming story about the world's greatest violin-playing polar bear is published by Orfeu Negro in Portugal, with an English edition due in 2017.

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Kirsten: ‘Balthazar the Great’ is a book about a violin-playing polar bear trying to find a safe place on the planet. He is freed from the circus by a group of activists and left in the middle of nowhere to find his own way home. Along the way he says goodbye to old friends and attempts to make new ones. He has to learn to fend for himself in a very big and often lonely world. Sometimes things work out well for him, but other times he gets a bit overwhelmed by the journey.

The book started out as a university assignment about two years ago. Narrative illustration was one module out of four I needed to complete for my postgrad illustration course. I was on holiday in Tanzania for most of that term and so I had to quickly make something happen in about a weekend to present to my lecturer when I got back. I locked myself in my bedroom for two days and just painted and painted. The first version of the book happened that weekend; at that point it was called ‘Henry Goes Home’. It's funny because I had just been to Tanzania, so I really thought I would make a book based there, but instead I made a book about a polar bear. Perhaps the Zanzibar story will appear in years to come.

I didn't actually start with a narrative at all. I started off just playing around with this bear character. I knew I wanted him to escape the circus and I knew he was going to go on some kind of journey, but that was about it; everything else happened organically.

I had also decided quite early on that I didn't want it to be a text-heavy book. I wanted the text to compliment the illustrations, but really I wanted the pictures to tell most of the story.

Because of the nature of how I work, there weren't very many preliminary sketches. I did a couple of character doodles of the bear and then just dove right in. My little personal challenge was for him to always be the negative space on the page – so he was always the remaining white of the paper once I had filled in the scenery around him. I think it was very much a case of the process dictating the story.

Near the end of 2014 there was a book fair in Cape Town, which is where I met Carla from Orfeu Negro. My lecturer organised for us students to have a table at the fair to showcase some of our coursework and work-in-progress. At that point, the book was a couple of spreads printed out and presented in a file. Carla spent a lot of time paging through the spreads and chatting to me about the story. It was the first real conversation I had about the possibility of publishing a picture book. A few months later Orfeu Negro contacted me and told me they wanted to publish my book. I don't think I've ever been so thrilled about anything. It was one of those big rare firework moments where you realise a lifelong dream is actually coming true.

By the time we started working on the book together I had graduated, had my first art exhibition, and was working as a visual artist in Cape Town.

It was interesting to see how my newer style of painting on a large scale could be integrated and applied to the picture book format. I don't see the two avenues of working as mutually exclusive; I think they feed into each other in a wonderful way.

The collaborative way of working with Orfeu Negro also added a new dimension to the story and I loved the process of putting the book together.

I feel like Balthazar and I are both on a very similar journey, and every new adventure the book goes on out there in the world is a new adventure for me too.

25 October 2016

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Kirsten Sims

South Africa

Baltasar O Grande / Balthazar the Great

Kirsten Sims

Orfeu Negro, Portugal, 2016

Baltasar O Grande /
Balthazar the Great