Character Rigging in After Effects

After watching a few After Effects tutorials on Youtube, it became clear that a useful way to help animate my characters would be to use character rigging, or body rigging. 
This means that parts of their body would be joined together, and so move together, to create sort of hinged joints.
I used this Youtube tutorial to help me with my work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dT4ibEhHM 

After managing to overcome problems in Illustrator, I was able to trace one of my character drawings, but drawing each part of her onto its own layer. This was only a rough drawing as it was my first time experimenting with body rigging.

Because I had drawn the different part of my character's body on separate layers in Illustrator, I was able to import the file into After Effects and have the layers and body parts still separate. 

I used the pan-behind tool to change the position of each part's anchor points, so that they would later be able to rotate around that point.

I then used the parenting tool to link together the relevant body parts, for example the foot to the lower leg, the lower leg to the upper leg etc.

Then, by changing the degree of rotation on a certain body part, I was able to make the body parts linked to it move as well.

This method of character rigging/body rigging was extremely useful to learn, and one that will save me a lot of time when it comes to animating my characters in an effective way.