Sometimes I do refer to the Hero's Journey to see if my characters are playing archetypes in my story. Even if I'm not conscious of constructing my characters using these archetypes, I often find they fit into them - which always is interesting to me.

Absolutely! That said, I don't necessarily consciously do so when I begin a project. When I'm first imagining characters, I just shoot fast and loose, from the hip, see who shows up, see what surfaces. But at some point, I then double-back and re-refer to The Hero's Journey to review WHO I have and WHAT FUNCTION my characters serve. I found this great "overview" of Christopher Vogler's "The Hero's Journey" -- http://calvarydevoted.org/Public/studies/film/stages-of-the-hero.pdf With each project I print that out and bounce my brainstorming notes against it. With my current script, I was over 100 pages of notes in before I pulled out this .pdf. Where the archetypes help me is figuring out if I can, in any way, combine characters, thereby ridding anyone unnecessary. They also help me further define the roles my characters play -- i.e. WHY they're in the story, what function they serve, how they'll serve it, etc. I wind up learning more about my characters in the process -- always a good thing!