Every drawn style exaggerates. Eyes, jaw length, limb proportion, hand size, hair volume: something is being pushed away from observed reality, and the choice of what to push is most of what makes a style recognisable. This is entirely ordinary and it becomes a problem only when it happens by accident.
Accidental exaggeration is what produces drift: a feature that gets slightly larger each time it is drawn until, forty images later, it no longer matches the earlier work. Deliberate exaggeration is a documented decision that stays where it was put.
Exaggeration needs a structure to push
Exaggeration works by distorting something the viewer recognises. If the underlying structure is not there, there is nothing to distort and the result reads as an error rather than as a style. This is why artists with strong construction can push much further than artists without it.
In practice that means understanding the ordinary version first, which is the constructive priority described in the piece on what improves figure drawing. Knowing where a joint is means you can move it deliberately.
The first limit is silhouette
Exaggeration stops working when it destroys the readability of the outline. A feature enlarged past the point where the figure still reads as a figure at small size has crossed the practical limit, whatever it looks like at full resolution.
The test is the usual one: fill the figure black and look at it small. Most exaggerations survive this comfortably; the ones that do not are the ones that will read badly in every feed, thumbnail and phone screen the work ever appears in.
The second limit is physical logic
The other limit is whether the body still behaves. An exaggerated form must still respond to gravity, still deform against surfaces, still be affected by clothing, and still permit the poses the story needs. Exaggeration that has to be drawn as a rigid shape because it can no longer behave has stopped being a body.
This is the structural argument from the piece on drawing soft structure, applied at the design stage rather than the drawing stage. If a design cannot sit down convincingly, the design has a problem.
Consistency makes it read as style
The same exaggeration applied across a whole cast reads as a style. Applied to one character it reads as a characteristic, which is a different and legitimate choice. Applied inconsistently it reads as inability, which is the outcome nobody wants.
That means exaggeration belongs in the style document as a checkable constraint, in the manner recommended in the piece on building a house style. Stated as a number or a ratio, it can be checked; described as an adjective, it drifts.
Exaggerating other things
Most work exaggerates the same small set of features, which is why so much of it looks alike. Pushing something else, hand size, neck length, the width of a stance, the mass of hair, produces distinctiveness at no extra cost and is considerably less crowded territory.
This is a practical route to a recognisable style, and it is more durable than technique, since it is a design decision rather than a rendering skill, as argued in the house style notes.
What exaggeration communicates
Distortion is not neutral. Enlarging a feature draws attention to it and tells a reader that it matters, and a design that pushes one thing very hard is making a statement about what the character is for. That may be exactly the intention, and it is worth being conscious of rather than inheriting from whatever the surrounding work happens to do.
The same applies across a cast. If every character is exaggerated in the same direction, the cast is saying something collectively that no individual design was meant to say, which is the pattern-across-an-archive point raised in the notes on design responsibility. Looking at the whole set together is the only way to notice it.
Keeping exaggeration under control
Decide what is exaggerated and by how much, write it down as a ratio, apply it consistently, and check the silhouette at small size and the behaviour in a sitting pose. Then compare new work against old work periodically to catch drift.
Characters here are fictional and unmistakably adult, and adult proportion is a fixed property rather than something exaggeration may compromise, as set out in the reader agreement.