These guidelines will likely evolve as I tend to not stick to one style forever, but anyway here's how I draw smuggies these days
Image transcriptions
A smug vitruvian man
1. Smuggies are drawn with a computer mouse, in MSPaint (I'm a madman okay)
2. Text is black bolded Segoe UI Semibold (you read that right), ideally font 24 or more
3. Lines and brushes are 5 pixels thick, should be done in one stroke, restart if the stroke looks bad
4. Minimalist backgrounds only when necessary, no backgrounds at all is fine
5. Separate panels with diagonal lines instead of straight lines because it's cooler
6. Don't forget the signature (thebad.website) somewhere at the bottom, font size 20 or less
7. Colors should be pastels, use one of the 20 in the default MSPaint color palette shown below
8. Only deviate from those 20 colors for shading on skin color (pick a color then darken or lighten)
Guidelines are not rules, they're meant to be broken when necessary!
Smuggie face sketches have a "toddler tries to draw an egg" type of shape. When going from sketch to face, it's fine to disrespect positioning of eyes and mouth if it allows the finished result to look cooler and smugger.
Smug faces have cartoonish expressions, the same eyes and mouths you'd put on stickmen but on a proper face.
Haircuts are part of the egg shape, ears are a good delimiter for where hair should end (unless long).
Break all rules when drawing known personalities, it doesn't matter if they have regular eyes, break the egg shape, all that matters is they're recognizable
Torsos are just a rectangle with a butt below the head
Body sketchlines don't need to be detailed, what matters is that the proportions put the head somewhere between 1/3 and 1/4 of the total body size
Adjust as needed in order to avoid bobblehead characters
It's fine if different drawings have different proportions but stay within 1/3 to 1/4
Hands… yeah… hands are hard to get right, but it turns out they're easier to draw busy than in a resting position, so try to keep em busy somehow
Thumbs up, asking a question, crossed arms, smug pose, anything...
Animals have no guidelines other than retry every line until it looks round and cute and deliberate, and make them small because it avoids having to add too many details
