dear august cloudmancy, do you have any horse drawing tips and if so, would you be so kind to share them with the class if you have the time?
I'm still in China, so stuck on mobile + without my drawing tablet, but I'll post my horse sketches and a modified version of my general animal drawing tips:
Horses, like any other animal, are 90% shapes. You want to get good at drawing these shapes. The most important place to start for a horse are at the SHOULDERS. You want to draw starting with the intention of the ENTIRE horse in mind. Don't do a bunch of disconnected hooves and legs and horse head shots until you're actually comfortable knowing what connects where. Doing a bunch of piecemeal 'studies' before you understand the whole animal's shape is a trap and a copout! You can see in my cleaned up horse lines that I always always draw out the shoulders, hips, and haunches.
Horses are hard for people to draw because their legs are weird. So this seems obvious to say, but get good at understanding their legs. You wouldn't believe the amount of people who go "horse bendy noodle legs hard" and leave it at that. It's best to look at a diagram of horse and human homologous limb structure, because then you can understand why they bend in the places they do. Like in math, actually understanding horse leg anatomy than simply remembering because then you can extrapolate from fundamental theorems.
In general, tracing over photographs of real horses is VERY helpful. Try tracing over an image that's been lowered to 20-30% opacity, then get rid of the photograph and redo your lines until it looks 'right' to your eyes. Drawing any animal, including horses, competently isn't about ACCURATELY FOLLOWING every single curve and crevice, it's about getting the shapes right.
