After I finished a decent looking skull on paper with a 4B, I started thinking what else was there to do, of course possibilities were endless, or well, maybe not so much. Took a picture of it, cleaned it on krita and started adding layers to the resulting black lines.
I went with the classics, that is a pirate, a skull candy resembling the ones for the Mexican tradition of "day of the dead". My first idea, which was to draw the muscles of the face on top of the skull was almost the last thing I drew.
When I finished with half of the muscles and created some kind of a creepy character, decided that I wanted to emulate Sergio Aragones and started playing with sketched characters around the space of the skull.
I think that is true, you have to start being able to draw the bones, know how the muscles work on top of them and how tendons also come into play in order to make believable characters. We definitely don't need to draw them all every time, but just knowing how things work and never to forget them, so that we can play with the human figure and get good results from it.
Tell me, what do your characters look like?