Deformation - Is there any way to 'deform' a section of a drawing?

Hello - apologies if I’m missing something, I’m a new user.

I have drawn a character, and I would like to take a section of it (the hips and legs) and make them ‘wider’ but with a smooth transition from the section I want to deform, into the rest of the drawing.

I used to use 3d Software ‘Maya’ and it had a tool called a ‘Lattice’ used to deform and animate objects. By placing a grid or box with a specified number of subdivisions, you could pull points on the grid, and it would deform the model beneath accordingly based on the location of the grid points.

At the moment I can only see that you can cut a section of the model and deform it, or move points in the contour editor point by point. I’d like to make a symmetrical modification around ‘the knees’ for example and just see a widening effect based on selecting just a few points, or a tool similar to the Lattice mentioned above.

Another feature that would be useful would be an ‘instance’ so I can draw half a model, and create a mirror image in an x - axis. I could then modify points and see how the overall shape behaves. This would also be a quick solution to drawing in some cases.

Once again, apologies if I am not understanding the software correctly at this stage, but does anyone have any help they can offer?

Thank you.
KB.