Past experience

In the past I have worked in a systematic approach to realising a final design. However, I feel that I sometimes miss steps, for example experimenting more with clothing. I find that I settle too quickly on a design and just make minor changes, as can be seen below. Whilst I was very happy with the design of the character, I feel that more work could have gone into it and I definitely could have explored different costumes to create different looks. I also feel that the clothing was a little too ordinary, there was not much fantastical or different about it. This can be improved by studying different types of clothing and getting comfortable with actually drawing clothing and studying the way it folds and falls on the body. 

If I keep this process in mind but add steps in between I could produce better characters in the future. 

When it comes to research and using other people's work as inspiration or a starting point, I once did a commission for someone, taking their original character idea, and looking at other artists' interpretations then finally producing my own.

Below was the original design by DeviantArt artist SatoshiTakeo:

I took the description of the character and I referred to other interpretations and came up with the design seen below. I took a different approach, a more realistic one, which resulted in a somewhat different look to the others. 

So having looked at my past experiences I can move forward and start working on building my own character and doing the relevant research beforehand.