Convex Concave other tips

Avoid right angles in poses. Make sure one side of limbs is smaller than the side facing you.

When drawing cartoons its best to exaggerate the attachment of the head, almost as if the head is a toy ball jointed onto the neck. But it can only look this way if the shape design of the head is very solid- the shape cannot look wobbly. In fact, most of the time, the head ISNT volumetrically drawn, when you overconstruct the head you loose the graphic sense of it- most of the time, the outline of the head itself, as a shape, has solid enough qualities to be graphic and solid and the same time, without overconstructing.

And the neck is something you just have to plain get right, because it's part of the spine. If the neck is off the entire body is off. 

Especially for the arms, legs, and hands, always refer to other body parts to size it out. Always know your peak, angle, and the width of a limb cross section before executing the outlines. Keep the outer contours of the limbs convex. 

Easy cartoon ryhtym (most of the time)- outer contours- convex, inner contours- concave.

If you are going to build a line don't lift your pencil to do it, execute the line as if you're coloring a coloring book. Build your lines for  inking things like hair, eyes, and lips, because they have soft complex curves.

Soft vs. Angular

And it hit me like a brick to the face . . . I draw waay too angularly by default. I think a lot of it has to do with my tense personality, but I'm gonna try and not draw like I usually do for a while, as playing up with variation between these extremes is a concept I overlooked for too long.

Active Phrases and Inactive Phrases

Designed Shapes

So I think that there is only one kind of shape in cartooning- and that's a designed shape. Unfortunately it's really difficult to draw a designed shape, because drawing a shitty shape is so damn easy. What is a shitty shape?

It's basically any shape that's easy to draw. A square, a sphere, circle, rectangle, an amorphous blob, hairy psycholined nonsense.

So one must mold a sense of not making a drawing easy and too undesigned. One must practice a design shape sensibility, and become extremely sensitive about the difference.
There are a number or reasons why a design shape is so difficult to draw:

1. A design shape depends on all other design shapes.
2. A design shape has number of definite lines.
3. By "definite" lines- they are not wonky- they are either a straight, a C-curve, or an S-curve. But its extremely difficult to draw a "real" S-curve, and not a wonky S-curve, so for now I say only Cs or Is.
4. There's always some kind of offset- a design shape does not have parallel evenly length-ed lines, because even lengths and parallel lines make a shape INORGANIC.
5. THE MOST IMPORTANT THING- a design shape leads your eye to where you want it to go.

Because you have five difficult criteria to juggle in your head to make a design shape work- I'd say putting a straight versus a curve is never a fluke; yet drawing squares and spheres is- because easy shapes are part of a child's geometry, they're shapes everyone knows. Designing Straight vs. Curves is more like an analytic proof in some college level math class.

Those Damn Spheres!