Yeah, that thing I promised by the end of the day is in progress. At some point, someone asked how I draw stuff, so I thought I'd scan this as I work on it. At this point I'm not sure I can stay lucid long enough to do the color, but we'll see.

This is the first step. I already have an idea of what the character is going to be doing (sitting near the bottom edge of the desktop, pointing at the Start menu/KDE button/whatever your GUI calls it, saying something relevant).
I lay down just a "stick figure," to figure out where the arms and legs and stuff go. I wish I could tell you how I get the proportions right (you can see where I put hashmarks to denote where the elbows are), but a. I'm not that good at it and b. as far as I know, it's just something you get better at by drawing. It's probably some kind of human instinct, you just start to know what looks right.

The ingredients for the first stage are plain white xerox paper, my ancient Pentel 0.5 QuickerClicker(?), and bits and pieces of a Magic Rub eraser.