I have always enjoyed drawing horses my whole life. For this post I thought it would be fun to give a brief demonstration on how I go about sketching my horses. For starters I usually find a reference photo (though in some cases it’s fun to just jump right in, checking the proportions of a reference photo later), and do a rough sketch of the whole thing.
I use loose gestures, trying to keep it in the sketch form. The next part I usually do is to mark out where the eyes, ears, and nose go. If the horse’s legs are in the drawing, I would block those out too.
Next comes the shading. I usually do a light layer of pencil, and gradually build the shading up from that. With horses, the darkest parts to shade are usually right under the cheek and along the neck, right under the eye, inside the nostrils and ears, and if there is a forelock or mane, there is usually a bit of shading right under it. Depending what breed of horse, the nose can be a bit darker than the rest of the face, or if there are a few markings, such as cowlicks and dimples.
