I spent like.... uh. Seven years doing "doodles" before I realized that was just stuff I was doing to make myself feel like I was accomplishing something when I actually wasn't. So now I try to primarily focus on doing pages and doing doodles only if I think something is not working out. I do draw references of the main characters because my proportions like to be kinda gelatinous, so... I gotta have somewhere to look to keep it in check.
When I do character designs I primarily focus on shapes, trying to pare down the character to a few simple shapes that would be their identifier. Luckily, I've had enough failures to know that I am not a details person so I don't even bother trying to load in too much detail into the character... If I can't sum it up in 4-5 colors and a few shapes and lines, I know that whatever I'm planning on will fail, haha. I'm insanely envious of people who CAN think in details though, haha. Meanwhile here I am all vroom vroom seven lines is good enough!
Like, this one was an older design that I inked by hand and I was like yeah lol this isn't gonna happen
My favourite aspects of characters and pages have been like... half mistakes. I'll draw an accidental line or circle and then go 
that actually looks better...
