I'm surprised there aren't a lot more choices. I would have thought this art was relatively quick to do. Maybe not.
There is a good article this week at Gamasutra about character design. It will partially answer some of your questions. You should be a little careful about believing everything there, though. It's written by one of the people who did Tomb Raider, so it's not necessarily without bias. Regardless, it's a good exposition of a philosophy of character design.
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