I'm Shalin Bhavsar and I design characters and costume by hand. I build the figure in blue pencil, resolve it in graphite or ink, and leave colour till last. Nobody taught me this. I worked it out a page at a time.
Original character and costume design first, then the studies behind it, then finished rendering.
I never took a class. What I know came from filling pages and paying attention to what went wrong on the last one. I design costume and armour from the body out: how a plate sits so it follows the deltoid, where a seam has to break so the arm can still move, whether the silhouette holds when you step back from it.
The rest of my week is machine learning and data science. This is the part that happens on paper.