Learning To Draw Horses

A few years ago, I thought it would be fun to try to draw horses. I bought a book on how to draw horses and was completely frustrated by the directions. Whatever I tried to draw didn't look much like a horse.

I mentioned this to one of my co-workers at the time. We both loved horses and shared an office. She had been drawing horses since she was a little girl and told me how she learned to draw horses. Her advice made much sense than the book and my horses looked more like horses - at the least the heads did. Bodies were a different matter. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get the bodies to look right.

By this time I was no longer employed at the same company so I couldn't ask my now former co-worker for advice. I tried going back to the book I had bought. It wasn't any more help on bodies than it had been on heads. Maybe I would just draw horse heads. That much I figured I could do! On the other hand, there's probably not a lot of call for art of just horse heads.

I couldn't ask my former co-worker for advice. The book I had wasn't helping me. I didn't have funds to buy  another book on drawing horses. Then I had my "a-ha" moment. The library! I did a search for "drawing horses" on the Hennepin County Library website, and there were a lot of books listed there. I picked one and requested to pick it up at the downtown library location.

The book starts with the very basics of drawing. It recommends breaking the parts of the horse down into their component shapes: circles, cones, cubes, cylinders, etc. This makes much more sense then the book I had bought. It also shows the basics of shading and blending tones. Wow! I wish I'd known about this book before I ever started learning to draw horses! One thing this book notes is that horses' rumps are shaped more like cubes than circles. Not that I spend time looking at horse rumps, but I've been noticing lately that horse rumps really are more like cubes than circles.

Another book that has been helpful is a horse anatomy coloring book published by Dover. I haven't used it as a coloring book, but as a guide to horse bones and muscles. Understanding the underlying bone and muscle structure makes horses look filled out and not just outlines. (I had bought that coloring book after I tried using a "sculpt your own horse" kit and my first attempt was shaped like a horse, but had no muscle tone.)

With the help of those two books (and others later on), I hope to become a skilled horse artist. I'm not rushing through it, though. I'm taking my time and not moving on to the next step until I have a good grasp of the step I'm working on. Who knows? Maybe someday my artwork will be accepted by Leanin' Tree for their greeting cards.