It seems I got a little ahead of myself. ^^"
Artists usually do their art in a "construction" style. They create the general pose by making a stick man. Then they use shapes like circles and rectangles to get the general figure. They use special lines to give everything a direction and help with proportions. The head, for example, starts as a circle and the middle of the face can be two lines shaping a + sign. That's useful if you want to have a more angled view, as well.
From there on it goes more and more into detail. And when everything is done they move to line art (with the aforementioned black pen), erasing the pencil stuff, coloring, shading, highlighting, etc.