Ok, I'll let you through into my though-process for the player:
The first that I wanted to do, id a robot. And I specifically wanted it to have a wheel which it would drive with. Then I needed to choose the color, and I decided of yellow. Since I didn't know how exactly I should've made the player feel alive, I just put a smile and some arms onto him. Then I was thinking on how the player should hold the numbers. Hands would be too difficult to make, so I came up with something. The player would have a little helipad like the ones spread across the different levels, that would activate when holding a number. And Ta-da! And now that you mentioned it, it really does look like a little pencil XD