I personally love modeling and working with Skin Modifier of Blender 3D since Blender 2.50, and now with Blender 2.81 this modifier is even faster in term of performance! You can have 2000+ poly edge bone and Skin Modifier can handle it no problem.

Hence we can do this Spring Bones Armature trick for our Skin Modifier. You can start from Polygon Edge and Skin Modifier it to get the mesh. Or you can start from Armature Bones, building the bones for your character, then turn it into Polygon Edge and skin it — I am using Sverchok nodes for this, but there must be a Python script that can do the same.

Armature and Rigging in Blender can be quite challenging but fun, I think this is one of them. Beginner should try understanding bone relationship and parenting and also Bone IK constraint (for legs) and you have a basic fun character.

And yeah, for this one, I has a bit of inspiration from Pokemon. Thanks to someone mention of this on Twitter.

SUDOWOODO:
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Sudowoodo_(Pokémon)