The next UK Com­ics Snap­shot inter­view is with the irre­press­ible Timothy Winchester;

1 / can you intro­duce your­self? what is your back­ground?

Ahoy! I’m Timothy Winchester and I like mak­ing things. These days I’m mak­ing less cuddly toys and what not in favour of draw­ing. I make a print comic called People I Know and I have a web­comic too. I’m like a father-of-two in that respect. but one of those dads that every­one thinks is super cool. Actu­ally, since I’m plan­ning on mer­ging my print comic with my web­comic at some point, I guess I’m more like a mad-scientist dad…

I didn’t study draw­ing or any­thing drawing-related at Uni­ver­sity and I have a full time job that also doesn’t involve draw­ing. my back­ground is pretty much zero proper draw­ing, unless you count my GCSE in Art – and since that cul­min­ated with me paint­ing char­ac­ters from Sun­set Beach, it’s prob­ably best to pre­tend it never happened.

2 / what drew you to com­ics?

The local news­agents stocked the odd Mar­vel comic – but ‘odd’ in the sense that I don’t think they sold them in sequen­tial order or any­thing, just whatever they happened to find. So I was read­ing X-Men sporad­ic­ally as a young­ster. Then I guess I just read more com­ics from there? but I didn’t get into mak­ing com­ics because I loved read­ing about psychic ninjas and stuff – it was more that it was the most access­ible medium for me. I love mak­ing things, but I can’t sing or dance so form­ing a band was out, knit­ting is too time-consuming and I don’t have a clue about build­ing web­sites or writ­ing books – so draw­ing seemed like the best solution.

Oh dear. that makes it sound like I draw com­ics because I suck at everything else, doesn’t it? I don’t though. Promise.

3 / who do you count as your influ­ences?

Urnk. The biggest influ­ence on what I make is just people and the things they say. Espe­cially celebrit­ies. They’re like what would hap­pen if ali­ens tried to cre­ate nor­mal people based on a game of Chinese Whispers.

As for draw­ing influ­ences, I guess read­ing com­ics helps you work out how they read and what works. but since my draw­ings are so basic, I think it would be insult­ing to any pro­fes­sional drawer that I cited as an influence.

4 / can you describe your work­ing pro­cess?

I can! How did you know?

I’ll have a thought or someone will say some­thing that gets me think­ing and I’ll make a note of it. I used to rely on men­tal notes but it’s alarm­ing how much you can for­get when you put your mind to it. So now I write everything down in my phone or in my sketch­book. It’s a use­ful habit I do for my nor­mal job and I recom­mend it. when I’ve got a spare minute, I go through what I’ve writ­ten down and do a thumb­nail – which is really noth­ing more than some squiggles in some boxes. I’m actu­ally too embar­rassed to include a pic­ture of how basic they look. Then I sit down, draw it in blue pen­cil, go over it in pen and scan it in. After a bit of clean­ing up it’s col­our­ing in time and then I save the fin­ished draw­ing into a folder called “TO UPLOAD,” on my com­puter. not everything gets uploaded to the Inter­net (believe it or not), but whatever does is moved into a “WEBCOMICS” or “PEOPLE I KNOW” folder and given a proper name. one day, I might upload the draw­ings that haven’t made the cut…

5 / what does your workspace/studio look like?

I have a desk in my bed­room but it’s covered in crap so I mostly work from the sofa or wherever I can find a flat sur­face. I have a desktop com­puter but aside from that, my work pro­cess is so pissy, I couldn’t jus­tify hav­ing a stu­dio. maybe I’ll get one if I ever learn to draw hands?

FUN FACT: Here is a list of some of the stuff on my desk right now:

An oven mitt that looks like sweet­corn, a toy chick that tweets when it sits on your hand, one red sock, a handker­chief, an unplugged lamp, some cough sweets, draw­ings of Jes­sica Fletcher, a Polar­oid cam­era, a cam­era that has a robot on it, a plastic thing that sounds like a sheep when you turn it upside down, some Poke­mon trad­ing cards.

6 / Do you think that people have dif­fer­ent expect­a­tions of web­com­ics over print com­ics?

I sup­pose people expect a short burst of fun from web­com­ics and longer storylines from print – but those people should know that you can get the oppos­ite too! There are web­com­ics that have long-running storylines and there are print com­ics which spe­cial­ise in lots of short strips.

I also sus­pect that people are much more open to web­com­ics as a medium. It’s just a web­site that hap­pens to have draw­ings on it and it’s eas­ily access­ible. People that read web­com­ics might not even think of them­selves as someone that reads comics.

7 / what are you work­ing on at the moment?

I’ve got two new com­ics in the works, both of which are wizard-themed. Wiz­ards are going to be my thing in 2011. they will be your thing too. Wiz­ards are going to be a big deal. they will be hot­ter than magma and cooler than ice cream. The tagline for 2011 is offi­cially “Let’s get magical!”

Here is a super sneak pre­view of one of them. It is a wiz­ard giv­ing a girl a flower. How could it go wrong?

8 / what are your ambi­tions for the future?

In 2010, I had two ‘events’ where I asked people to get involved and send in draw­ings. The one in the Sum­mer was about draw­ing mon­sters and Novem­ber had Jes­sica Fletcher Week. I’m already work­ing out what the next event will be because I think things like that are a great way to get all sorts of people draw­ing (as well as pay­ing homage to Jes­sica Fletcher).

I’m plan­ning on try­ing to stick to the Monday to Fri­day update sched­ule for at least another six months and then see how it goes from there. I’d like to try out another long-form strip in place of one-offs, maybe with People I Know #12 – although I’m a little nervous. To be fair though, I’m nervous about most things. Nervous is one of my default states.

Also, I’d love to go to an over­seas con­ven­tion. Fin­gers crossed, eh?

MONSTER WEEK: (http://timothywinchester.blogspot.com/search/label/Draw%20A%20Monster)

JESSICA FLETCHER WEEK:

http://timothywinchester.blogspot.com/search/label/Jessica%20Fletcher%20Week%202010

9 / what advice would you give to an aspir­ing ama­teur car­toon­ist?

Stop ask­ing other people for advice and get to work! I don’t mean that in a mean way – just that what works for other people might not be the best way for you. The more you work, the more stuff you’ll try and the more your skills will evolve. It’s like Poke­mon! if you don’t believe me, go onto any web­comic (or print comic) and com­pare their first strips with the stuff they’re put­ting out now. or just look at one strip from every year they’ve been act­ive. Check out how dif­fer­ent they look. my web­site has only been act­ive for a year but even in that space my draw­ings look so dif­fer­ent! And that’s not because I’m using the same pen/computer/whatever as some hot-shot pro­fes­sional draw­ing per­son — it’s just that I’ve tried out a bunch of stuff and found out what works best for me. I fully expect my stuff to look dif­fer­ent next year too.

I’ve included a col­lage of pages from my print comic over the years. I totally tried new things – I even tried draw­ing hands, and it’s thanks to try­ing stuff out that I know what works best for me.

Oh – and my other piece of advice is to be nice and to work hard.

10 / what do you think of the health of the UK com­ics scene at the moment, and what do you think it can do bet­ter?

This has been the first year I’ve actu­ally felt part of any scene – in the sense that there are things to get involved in and people to talk to. So I guess that’s a good thing? but I think UK com­ics people need to con­cen­trate on get­ting their work to a wider audi­ence – whether that’s inter­na­tion­ally or involving people that might not read com­ics nor­mally. You can’t just have your stuff read by other comic-making people. that isn’t a scene, that’s a slightly weird party. I think that’s some­thing that we are Words + Pic­tures are great at – get­ting com­ics out to people that wouldn’t nor­mally think about read­ing comics.

FUN FACT: I wrote a blurb about the global suc­cess of Japan­ese com­ics in this sec­tion but ended up delet­ing it since it was just got weird.

11 / where is the best place to buy your work?

Urnk. At con­ven­tions and stuff? maybe? I need to set up a shop at some point. That’s a bit embar­rass­ing con­sid­er­ing my last answer was just “get your stuff out to a wider audience.”

Thanks Timothy! now, go and fol­low Timothy on Twit­ter until he reveals the loc­a­tion of his online shop!

Timothy Winchester Interview at The Comics Bureau