First you must design your character in the CONTACT position (see Position Guide for Legs). Use your time well and try to design a character that you can be proud of. You may choose to draw your character on paper. If you decide to do so, I can show you how to scan your image and bring it into flash for you to trace.
SUGGESTION 1: Draw the body and head first. Then imagine how tall your character is. Keeping this in mind, draw a horizontal line that represents the ground - this will help you determine the length of each leg.
SUGGESTION 2: My experience is that characters with very short legs are very challenging to animate smoothly using this detailed walk cycle.

Ideally, you should design your character with each animated body part on a separate layer. By designing you character in the contact position, you will have all the needed parts (except for the optional foot with toes bent down) The following are the different body parts that we need to be able to isolate so that each one can be converted into a symbol.

• arm-hand
• body-head
• straight leg
• bent leg
• straight foot (toes in neutral position)
• bent foot (toes bent upwards)
• (Optional) bent foot 2 (toes bent downwards - for characters without shoes)

IMPORTANT NOTE: Design the body parts so that the parts overlap each other. Try to imagine how each part will move in relation to the other parts and design them so that breaks don’t occur when the parts move. Think about how each part may rotate, and imagine around which point the part will rotate.

Select each body part and convert them into symbols ("Modify" menu > "Convert to Symbol..." or F8. This is where having things on different layers pays off. You can lock certain layers during this process to keep from selecting the wrong parts. For your first animation, you should use the same body setup as the character used in my online examples. In addition to what you’ve already drawn, you may need to draw another version of the foot (the toes bent downwards version).

NOTE: At this point, do NOT think of (or name) the body part SYMBOLS as "left leg" or "right leg" but instead think of them as "bent leg" or "straight leg." When it comes time to animate, the left leg (for example) will sometimes be straight and other times be bent.