Almost every distortion you'll ever want is one of four moves, or a mix of them. Get these into your hands and you can take any plain shape and push it somewhere expressive.
The Four Moves
First, stretch — pull the shape wider or taller than it should be, so it looks elongated, elegant, or strained. Second, squash — the opposite: press it flat, so it reads as heavy, comic, or crushed. Third, skew — lean the whole thing sideways, as if it's been shoved, blown by wind, or caught mid-fall; the verticals tilt and the shape gains motion. Fourth, scale — grow or shrink the whole object evenly, which keeps its proportions but changes its presence, exactly the lever you met in rung one. In the toy, each slider does one of these, and you can layer them — a tall stretch plus a hard skew gives you something that looks like it's striding off the page.
A Worked One, Slowly
Start with a plain, honest object — the little chair-shape in the toy will do. Don't change anything yet; notice it reads as calm and ordinary. Now drag the height handle upward until it's twice as tall: instantly it feels stretched and a bit anxious. Pull the skew dot sideways and it leans like it's about to topple. Knock the scale up and the whole exaggerated thing now looms. At no point did you draw a new object — you took one shape and transformed it. That's the entire craft of this rung, and the dashed ghost outline lets you see exactly how far from "normal" you've travelled.
Exaggerate, Don't Just Deform
The word that matters here is exaggerate. Anyone can mangle a shape at random and get something ugly. The skill is choosing which quality to push — the height of a thing, its droop, its lean — and pushing that one quality hard while leaving the rest believable. A cartoonist stretching a runner's legs is exaggerating speed; a sculptor softening a hard object is exaggerating weakness. Decide what you want the object to say, then aim your distortion straight at it.