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"Thinking up a character can take seconds, or it can take years. Sometimes you'll have an idea of a character lurking away in the back of your mind over a really long time, and then one day they'll just pop up, all fully formed. Other times you'll start from scratch with a pencil and a sheet of paper and work at it for an hour or two to get what you need."

If that seems too hard, says Paul, get someone on side to help you. "The first character I came up with was a rock-climber I drew while I was chatting with a friend," he said.

"We were bouncing ideas round and we just made him more and more absurd. Those are the sort of conversations you should be having all the time, with other people and with yourself. Think, 'how can I make this funnier?'"

The next step

When you find a character you're happy with, it's time to set it into a strip. "Work out the story for your character before you start," advised Paul. "Use a pencil, do lots of rubbing out, and plan all the stages of your story.

"It can be so frustrating to get to the end and find out you haven't got room for the big idea you planned to put in there. You have to start all over again, which is horrible when you have a page full of detailed designs in front of you."

"I like to work with a whole bunch of different characters," said Paul. "From a commercial point-of-view, obviously you have to have a certain signature style and particular characters that you work with.

"Outside of that though, I think it's really important to keep messing around in sketchbooks, to find new characters that are as bizarre and as different as possible. You never know what you might come up with."

Getting published

"Where to try and sell your cartoons depends what sort of strip you are drawing," explained Paul. "If you're doing specialist characters like me, you need to make sure there's a market for that. There will probably only be four or five magazines in the sector you are looking at, and they may never have carried a cartoon before.

Cartoonist Paul Evans

"If you are working on a more general idea, you need to pitch to a bigger comic-book publisher. Go to the trade fairs, meet the people who can publish your work and get talking to them. It's called networking, and it works."

And is it advisable to try and turn your hobby into a career? Or should you stick to the day job?

"If you're into it, at some point it's not going to be a hobby any more," said Paul. " Just go for it - do as much as you can, throw away a lot of paper, and eventually you'll find something that works.

"Try a design that's different to what's been done before. Or take something similar to popular cartoons and adapt it to a new niche area. Don't worry about copying too much - you've got to copy to learn."

Be warned though, that there can be downsides. The worst job you've ever done?

"I drew one strip for a mountain-biking magazine, and then found out that there had to be a mountain bike in every box," said Paul. "A mountain bike takes a long time to draw. I could have cried."