Not sure if I am helping, but what I personally do is that I draw my character on an index card, scan it through my portable scanner, and as primarily an Aseprite user I ink and color the character over, scale it down to the appropriate level, and then clean up.
The results have varied.
My aim is to go for something Treasure-like. From my view, the characters made by Treasure all seem to be stick figures of some sort with meat on them.