Lets face it building a character is the one of the biggest challenges a writer faces.
Six basic methods of characterization:

• Physical description - In order for you as the reader to create a visual image of the characters, authors might include physical descriptions. You might learn the character's height, weight, age, hair color, eye color, how the character stands or walks, or any similar detail.
• Attitude and feelings - This method is dependent on how you interpret or describe the character's attitude. Using context clues about the character's reactions, you will be able to infer how he or she seems to feel about what is happening. In some instances, the author will directly explain the character's attitude.
• Thoughts - Whether the narrator describes the character's thoughts or the character voices them outright, these too can help shape characterization.
• Dialogue - What a character says could potentially reveal his or her attitude, beliefs, or personality traits.
• Reactions of others - You can infer if the character is popular, liked, or disliked based on the way other characters interact with or treat him or her.
• Actions--past and present - How a character behaves in a certain situation is another way to assess his or her personality traits. Because the main characters are often well-developed, you will not only read about how the character reacts to situations, but you will also notice how the character's reactions change over the course of the work.

So, how do you go about creating believable characters?
First of all, bear in mind that creating believable characters doesn’t, funnily enough, necessarily mean creating realistic characters.
People read stories, in part, because of how they’re so different from real life. Stories are more logical than real life. They have happy endings - or, at the very least, they have satisfying endings - in stark contrast to real life, which often has no proper endings at all, least of all satisfying or happy ones.
What we like about stories is that they’re about real life with the messy bits tidied up. And that includes the characters, because in real life, people are often inconsistent and arbitrary. They do things for no obvious reason - sometimes they don’t even know themselves why they’re doing them.
But readers would have no patience whatsoever with such characters. Fictional characters have to behave consistently and logically. This doesn’t mean that they cannot do stupid things, or illogical things, or ill-advised things. They can, and frequently do! But they should do those things for consistent and logical reasons.

Info-dumping is one of the worst sins you can make as a writer.
But what exactly is info-dumping? And why is it so bad?

It is the process of giving information clumsily and inappropriately. For sure you need to tell the back-story, describe your character's personality, and the story's setting. However, all this information should be elegantly woven into the story, not pasted arbitrarily on, or dumped. (Hence the phrase info-dumping because you're dumping information on the page.)

It's bad because it's jarring for the reader. It takes her out of the story to a certain extent because it's communication from the author rather than the characters. It's a form of telling-not-showing.

Here's the start of a story (my story Grace Under Pressure, in fact):

It was a sunny April day in Ireland, and I had just got dressed up. I hoped my husband Dev would appreciate this - he didn't seem to appreciate me much any more. It was only a cheap dress, seeing as we were broke now.

Now, there's nothing wrong with that as such, but it's flat, and the information is given very bluntly.

Here's a better version, which is the version that actually begins the book:

I gave myself a final, critical, scrutiny in the mirror, turning this way and that to view myself from different angles, and I gave myself a nod of approval. I’d do. I still scrubbed up reasonably well, I was glad to note. Dev would surely have to notice how much effort I had made. He would definitely pay me some sort of compliment.
I hoped.

I was wearing a brand new dress (bought at one of the less-expensive chains, given our current financial situation, but even so I was pleased with it). It was a dark pink halter-neck with a wide skirt and tons of netting underneath. I wore a cream crocheted shrug over it, given that it was only mid-April. The weather was exceptionally good mind, but still, mid-April in Ireland? How warm could it be?

The second example is still only 141 words long, but it gets in all the important information: the fact that she's feeling a bit neglected by Dev, the fact that they're financially challenged, the fact that it's April in Ireland. (It's always important to get the time and location established early.)

Do you see, though, how much more subtly it gets these facts across? They're slipped in almost incidentally. The detail about the shrug, for example, not only gives us a better mental image of the heroine's appearance, but allows us to comment on the fact that it's April and Ireland, rather than say so straight out.

The second example didn't manage to give us the information that the heroine was actually married to Dev, but that was okay - the information wasn't relevant right away.

Now, of course there will be times for giving straight-forward information, times when you just cannot do it any other way. But do try to slip the relevant information in subtly whenever you can - it makes for much more professional and glossy writing

 

I liked your first opening. That sets an entirely different tone to the second one. The first one is setting up a rather bitter and disappointed heroine to go meet the world. The second one is much more hopeful, only a small tinge of despair.

You could start with either depending on the mood you set, and then move the story in whatever direction you want. The direction could be a surprise, given the opening. Or it could be in line with the opening, depending on the progression you're after.

I was going to say that the second one goes into a lot of detail about the dress. It washed over me (being a man). But then this is a woman narrating, they look at things like that.

I entirely agree with you about info-dumping.

 

Me being of a foreign language (french), I will certainly benefit from such info when starting a new story. I realize that this thread is close to a year old, but I will still put in my grateful comments. I'm starting now to ingest all the articles published here. This is the task I give myself, before pushing ahead in my learning process. Thanks.