Hey Freemium, <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">
I'm not sure off hand if you're interested in info on animation in Construct 2's editor, or info on character animation in general, but hopefully some of what follows may help. <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">
C2 Animations
In Construct 2, when you double click a sprite to open the image editor, there are two other windows that open with it, the "Animation frames" window, and the "Animation" window. The Animation window shows a list of the animation sequences you've created for your sprite. Initially the list should only contain one animation named "Default", but you can Right-Click in the Animation window and (from the context menu) choose "Add animation".
In the Animation window, if you click on an animation, you can edit its speed and other properties in the "Properties" panel.
You can also Right-Click on an animation to rename it or duplicate it.
So for a typical sprite character, you might want to make several animations for standing, walking, jumping, falling, attacking, and so forth.
Then in the event editor, you can add actions to switch between animations.
e.g. When the player holds the left or right move key, set the sprite's animation to "walking", and when left and right aren't being held, set animation to "standing".
A little oversimplified, but same basic idea. <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">
Sprite sheets for reference
As for the more general side of character animation, it might help to take a look at sprite animation work from existing games.
The Spriters-Resource is an open database of actual sprite animation sheets from a wide array of games from many systems. It's organized by game system, then by letter, and then often by character or asset type within the game.
e.g.
Super Mario World:
http://www.spriters-resource.com/snes/smarioworld/
Mario...
Exploring sprite sheets
A little off topic, you can find some interesting things by looking through various sprite sheets.
For instance, In Super Mario Kart, some interesting optimizations can be seen in the sprite collections that make up a character.
As you can see in the image above, there are 8 different distance levels for a character, and for farther distances, fewer angles are used.
Likewise, you may notice that there are 12 angles for the close-up distances. If you look closely you'll see that 8 of those images represent the first 90 degree span, (facing away to facing sideways), and the last 4 represent the last 90 degree span, (facing sideways to facing the viewer). I would guess that there are half as many images representing angles facing towards the viewer, because in a race game, if a character is very close to you, they'll most likely be heading the same direction you are, and so they'll most often be facing away from the viewer.
I think that's kinda neat. :D