Share artboards between files

I'm illustrating a series of children's picture books. I need to show some of the characters many times in multiple different poses. I also need their appearance to remain very consistent throughout. For that reason, I've started a file for each character. Within each of those files, I have multiple artboards. Each artboard contains the character in a different pose. The idea being that, when I need a pose similar to that one, I could copy-paste or otherwise import it into the file for the book I'm working on. Then just make slight adjustments for the scene.

My problem is, I've been stymied trying to actually do this. When I copy-paste, it only pastes a path onto a layer mask but loses all the details. When I try to place embedded, it brings in ALL the artboards with all the poses. There there doesn't seem to be a way to pick just the one I want.

I really don't want to have dozens of separate files. I'm trying to build an easy, convenient resource library.

One more thing, I'm doing all of this in Photoshop. I know that Illustrator is better for drawing and InDesign for the book layout. However, at the moment I have to deal with budget concerns. For my purposes, Photoshop will do everything Illustrator will.

The question is whether what I want to do is even possible. Can I do it in Photoshop? Or will I have to use InDesign or some other tool?

To recap:

• Two files, each with multiple artboards.
• I want to pull just a single artboard from one of the files and embed it onto a single artboard in the other.
• I will do this multiple times but always pulling just one artboard at a time.

[ moved from Adobe Creative Cloud to Photoshop by moderator ]