If the paper drawing you made in ELAR and Levelled with Photoshop is bright enough, it may be possible to use Photoshop to remove the background and divide up the monster into parts. These can sometimes then be animated in After Effects too!!!

There are a number of textures/patterns that you can fill shapes with. For clothing especially, have an upper layer with a low opacity pattern and an underlayer with a base color seems to work the best! Pattern scale can also be changed!

With a slight adjustment to the Scale tool, you can make the pattern fill larger or smaller. It will distort the shapes in the pattern if you aren't careful... or maybe that's what you want to do?

The particle system in AE can make coins rain from the sky, hearts float out from a valentine, or in this tutorial I found, bees shoot out from a nest. Custom particles can take an animation to the next level but take a bit of practice.

There are so many things to animate with After Effects that Adobe provides a special program called Bridge that helps you see previews of what they will do before you apply them to a layer or composition in AE.