Tapered painting

Okay, So, I know a question about drawing may seem a bit… less intricate than some of the things I am sure you guys get hung up on, but here is my issue…

I’ve recently decided to trace over an animation from a cartoon as a reference for my own animation that I am making. Now, my hang up is that I use the line tool for the tracing, and then convert the lines to paint so that I can shape them better to match how the characters from the show look. Where the legs connect to the body the line get gradually thinner from where it started. I don’t have a tablet and trying to do it with the mouse leaves too many lumps. The results are not acceptable, nor efficient. In all, I have about forty frames to optimize my traced lines, to the good looking tapered paint. The show was done in flash, so I know it must be possible in CS5. Aside from the subselection tool (Which horribly warps my lines and is extremely tedious for a frame by frame animation), does anybody know a more efficient way to do this?