Design Character for animation

Drawing-wise, a great way to start out is to stick to simple shapes and just move them around the page to create an expressive character. When in doubt, start with one shape and just change the size, placement and symmetry to see what you can get out of it, like this little dude I made out of mostly circles:

As for improving your drawing skills, it's really just practice. If you can make yourself draw a little bit from observation every day, even for 15 minutes, you'll see your skills grow over time. It's a lot like lifting weights - the more you do, the stronger you get. Seriously.

I would recommend using Illustrator for creating a character that you want to animate.  If you are using Animate CC, I would just go for basic colors and avoid gradients for example.

I worked with the guys from Tour de Animate on an official sample called 'Bringing characters to life.'  This was fully sponsored by Adobe! And you can download the samples to experiment with.

Tour de Animate

As far as designing characters... anyone can draw.  Even simple characters are easy to make in Illustrator just using shapes... as you get more experienced you can start doing more detailed characters.

DRAW EASY, Illustrator TUTORIAL - YouTube

There are several tutorials like this on YouTube if you look up 'simple shape characters, illustrator.'

Enjoy!

What kind of animation will you be doing?

Which app will you use for animating the character.

That apart: you will need to practice drawing.