Our project was to design a character that fell into each of the following five categories and also to have one prop.
Gender: male or female
Age: infant, child, teenager, adult, elder
Personality: sad, happy, angry, coy, sneaky, dullard, among others
Animal: elephant, bear, opossum, mouse, cat, dog, monkey, bird, insect, among others
Costume: astronaut, cowboy, samurai, nerd, superhero, Pacific Islander, among others
We had to choose from the list of specific items that we were given. So, for instance, I couldn't just choose to draw a ninja because ninjas were not listed. Nor could I design a character who was surprised, because "surprised" was not listed.
I chose to draw an adult, male, sad, samurai monkey, with a broken sword.
The project had to be done in graphite with a full range of tone.
Here's my final piece (not sure how to make graphite look the best, so I fiddled with a levels a bit, but whatever. The actual piece looks a bit nicer than this):

-Woody