It’s really just one of many mediums that can be used to express anything you want!  It just so happens to be one of my favorites.  There’s nothing quite like seeing a drawn/modeled/sculpted character come to life through animation, the possibilities for the stories you can tell and the emotions you can convey are limitless.

Just a lot of practice and experimenting!  I just try to keep in mind lots of factors that I think lead to stronger designs - strong silhouettes, color theory, flow, expressiveness, etc.  There’s a lot of elements that lead to strong character design and I’ve still got a long way to go myself.  Personally I find lots of inspiration in the works of Studio Trigger and Gainax, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and all sorts of other cartoons and web animators.  I also really recommend checking out Aaron Blaise on YouTube, he’s got tons of art tip videos including character design stuff, and he’s ex-Disney so he knows his stuff.  Thanks a bunch for your support!

Last Airbender, Home Movies, early Simpsons, early Spongebob, Berserk 1997, and Kill la Kill off the top o my head

Nope!

I can’t pick one, but Oney Plays, Super Eyepatch Wolf, Jordan Under, and Brutalmoose are ones I tend to fall back on lately.

It was made in Toon Boom with bitmap brushes!  Just a pencil brush texture I brought over from other drawing software.

I’ve just come to really like how a lot of its brush settings feel for painting.  It’s not really laggy for me, so it might just be having trouble running on your hardware.  I will say that back to back with CSP the brush seems to have a TINY bit more delay in PS that I can’t seem to get rid of, which is why I prefer sketching in CSP, but it feels fine for painting.

All sorts, at this point I don’t really have “mains” anymore.  I’ve also switched over to Photoshop for most of my painting work, but I still prefer CSP for stuff like inking and pencil sketches.  Generally you can’t go wrong with brushes by Frenden or Flyland Designs, those are still ones I always come back to.