To start off designing your character, you need to brainstorm some ideas. A good place to start is by collecting images of animals, people, and objects to be used as reference materials. Good reference materials is essential to the believability of your character creation. Here are several ways of getting ideas for your character.

One easy way of generating ideas is to take something organic and combine it with something inorganic. First create a chart with two columns with the labels organic and inorganic and then start writing down whatever you can think of into these two columns. Once you think you have enough ideas, start pairing one item from the organic column with one from the inorganic column. An example would be: a snake and a car type of character.

Another more complex way of generating ideas for characters is to create a chart with the following columns: body type, head type, arms/hands type, and legs/feet type. Once you have created these chart headings, it is time to fill in each column by writing whatever comes to your thoughts. The chart shown below, gives you an idea of what you can place into the different columns. Once you have this chart made up with the different things, you can now start playing with ideas by mixing the first column with the different rows and the other columns. An example of a type of character could be: tiger-horse head with a human body-type quadruped, mechanical winged-creature.

If you want something that is more "normal", a good way to get some ideas is to make up a list with the different attributes that the "normal" character can have (i.e. fat nose, thin nose, big eyes, small eyes...etc.).