How to Create a Gazillion Characters

One of my favorite things to do with a new group of kids is to brainstorm a whole bunch of words and then use them to generate ideas. This week I taught a drawing camp at my son's school.
I don't know if you can see this too well, but what we did was to think of a whole bunch of nouns that were creatures of some kind - and wrote them on index cards. Then the kids would pick two cards, and draw the result. We got things like a mer-panda, a gangster cow, a monkey chicken, and lots of others. For some kids, this bloomed into a whole society of characters. For others, one quickly became a favorite. They got names, personalities, and even relationships.
Later on I took one of mine, "Gangster Cow," and turned him into a sort of bad guy who was going after another student's creation, "Laser Man."
Then as another twist, you can create another set of cards that has places or adjectives and mix them in. One good combination of cards is Adjective + Adjective + Noun. Another is Noun goes to Place. As you can see, there are a whole lot of combinations. And, kids can run the game themselves. I really enjoy watching the whole thing take on its own life.