err this isnt really a tutorial, you see i've always had a really hard time figuring out exactly why animal legs look the way they do in cartoons. silly, i know. i guess it never occurred to me to think of the skeleton underneath anyway, after looking at a lot of balto model sheets and a preston blair book, i finally was able to figure it out.

basically, i pretend the limb is like an actual human arm/leg. there is a "hip joint" where it connects to the pelvis, a "knee"(/elbow), then the "wrist", then the "palm" and "fingers" that make up the paw

first i draw the line of action for the whole figure, then the underlying skeleton as described above, then build volumes and connect them. et voila! er.. this wont really help anyone, but yeah