How to draw a horse. Are you wondering how to draw a horse satisfactorily? You are not alone: horses are certainly among the most portrayed animals ever. They are, in fact, elegant and fascinating animals. It is precisely for this great fascination that they have always exercised on man – as well as obviously for the role that this animal has had for centuries in our life – that artistic representation of horses abounds. Sculptures, portraits, paintings, the art galleries are filled with galloping, grazing, or prancing horses.
Learn to draw a horse from scratch
You probably don’t aspire to an exhibition, at least for now: all you want is to figure out how to draw a horse with your pencil – or maybe with your charcoal. In any event, you’ve reached the best place! In this example, you will discover whereby to make a portrait of a horse from scratch. All you need is the desire to learn, a little patience, a few graphite pencils of different hardness, a sketchbook, drawing sheets, a white eraser, a rubber bread, and a sharpener for your pencils. We can start!
Choose the horse to draw
Since the Bronze Age, it is estimated, man has begun to tame horses: since then, these animals have been – often despite themselves – by our side. Horses for saddle, harness, draft, peasant or squire, and perhaps the rider have always given these animals a precise role.
Maybe you didn’t think about it, and without even knowing it, you were already inclined to draw an Arabian horse, very fast and elegant. Or maybe you prefer to portray a workhorse, such as the massive Quarter Horse, or a Clydesdale, a Scottish heavy draft horse that weighs a ton. Have you already got an idea? Before understanding how to draw a horse, you need to know the horse you will hatch!
We create sketches of a horse’s drawing and proportions
Each drawing inevitably starts from a preparatory phase, and therefore from the sketches and sketches. So grab your sketchbook and a sketch pencil (with a pretty hard lead) and start practicing. First, to learn how to draw a horse, you need to think about its proportions. But, of course, these vary a bit between the various breeds, and it indeed cannot be said that they are the same for a horse, for a young foal, or perhaps for a pony and lotus drawing.
In general, though, you can think that your horse’s basic unit is the size of its head, from nose to ears. You can, therefore, roughly calculate that the horse is 4 chairs long in total, that it is high – at the withers – about three heads, and that the measurement of the abdomen is very similar to that of the head. Starting from these proportions, you can move on to sketching the structure of your horse: do not think about the details, but only about the proportions and movements.
You can draw the horse’s trunk like a giant bean, tapering towards the rear with many mammals. The neck is a truncated cone that ends in another conoidal figure (the head) while the legs are each made up of two relatively thin cylinders, connected by showy joints, which at this stage you will reproduce as spherical. Starting from these elements, try to sketch a horse in different positions on your sketchbook: at a trot, the manager, and rest. And don’t forget that to draw well, you have to have fun!
Draw the horse’s muzzle
Many beginners trying to figure out how to draw a horse get stuck at the sketch of the muzzle. We all know how a horse’s head is made, but we pass from here to remove it correctly! It, therefore, becomes beneficial to proceed step by step, at least the first few times. For example, above, we told you that you could sketch a horse’s head as if it were a conical figure – well, it’s not exactly that simple. Therefore, we advise you to do a separate study to draw the horse’s head, starting from a highly stylized shape that serves only and exclusively for the proportions, with straight and clear lines.
This way, you will draw the neck, ears, and muzzle. From this square contour, then, you should derive the natural features of the horse, tracing the profile of the jaw, the shape of the muzzle, and the line of the neck: in doing so, you will be able to have a faithful horse’s muzzle, without upsetting the proportions and shapes!
Step by step pattern to painting a horse
Here we are at the step-by-step guide on how to draw a horse. You can draw a horse grazing, running, or engaged in a jump – the gist does not change, as you will always have to tackle the steps as we will show them below. However, we suggest you begin with a simple portrait of a horse at rest, seen from the side, perhaps with the muzzle turned towards you, to make the drawing some movement without making it too complicated. As always, when doing pencil drawings, you will have to start with the outline of the structure, as we have seen above. Therefore, on your drawing sheet, you will go to draw light sketches with an intermediate or hard pencil, easy to erase, and then sketch the contours of the horse.
In drawing the profile of the animal, without concentrating excessively on the details, it already begins to sketch the shapes of the visible muscles and bones, especially at the level of the legs, to allow greater realism. Then refine your horse’s coat, also emphasizing the volumes at this stage. Finally, to remove any stains on the skin, you can use the eraser to erase small circular portions. Usually, in the drawing of horses, the drawing of the hair on the body is omitted, where it is very short and shiny, to trace it instead only at the level of the mane and tail, where it is longer and showier.
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