I'm a dumb and forgot to really say what program I use. The program I use is Krita which is completely free! I also use a brush pack you can get for free here.

(This is just to show the two brushes I use most for making my hair!)

Hello there! I've lost count of how many times people have asked me on tutorials of this and that on how I do my art... And I am finally giving you all what you wish! This thread is IMAGE HEAVY!!! I recently made a personal piece for myself, and tried my best to take screenshots of every step I took in the process. I will separate it by post on the different parts, i.e. hair, body prep, wings, etc.

You can find the ImgBB folder HERE if you wanna just look at the images there, but be warned, I did not include any guidance text on the images themselves!

This is the image we will be doing a step-by-step on!

Without further ado... Lets get crackin!

To start, we will have our subject cut out and placed on the background where we want it to be! In my case, the horse is submurged in water, so a majority of the legs are erased.

This is the horse I will be mimicing!

And this is what we start out with!

The most important part of everything we do is MAKING GROUPS! This allows us to alpha lock layers to the base layer so we can be as messy and careless as we want! So, uh... Make a group for our horse.

Next up, I shaded my horse to fit more with the background... In this case a light tealy color. Duplicate your horse layer and use the Hue, Saturation, Lightness (HSL) adjustment to change the color of the horse. Make sure you check the "colorize" box to make everything the same hue, or your horse will turn into a flurry of different colors!

Alpha lock this layer and set it to "Color" in your layer mode/settings (usually it will say "Normal"). Lower the opacity until you get the desired look.

Duplicate this layer and set it to "Soft Light". This gives our horse more depth and contrast, as well as finishes the hue change. Adjust the opacity to your desired look.

Next, merge this group we have to make one solo image and create a new group with this merged image. Duplicate the layer, and alpha-lock it. Now begins the real body prep... Smudging!

After everything we have done, this is where we are currently sitting. Ready to start smudging? Take your smudge tool, lower the opacity to 10%-15%, and size the brush appropriately. You don't want the brush size to be too large or you will lose ALL definition in the horse. We don't want it to look like a blob, we want it to simply blur the pixels to look smooth!

While smudging, I like to go in the direction of the highlights and shadows as best as I can so I can keep their definition. If you lose them, do not fret! We will add them back in a bit more later on.

Next, lower the opacity of the smudged layer. I like mine to be somewhere between 60%-70% depending on how heavily I smudged and how "noisy" the image was.

Now we start redefining those shadows and highlights to make them pop a little more. Eyedrop the darkest color from the horse. In my case, I took the color from the darkest part of the black legs. You can also take from the darkest shadow and make it a tad darker. Using a hard-edged, pressure-sensitive brush, we lightly scribble where our shadows are. Don't be afraid about being messy... We will blur this next. I'm lazy, so I use the Gaussian Blur filter and play with the intensity to get the desired look. Set the layer to "soft light". Sometimes I need to duplicate this layer to make the shadows more intense! Don't be afraid to play with layer opacity!

Next, we repeat the above but with our highlights. For this, I chose the lightest color from my background. This helps blend your horse into the environment a little better because it mimics the color of your overall "light" of the piece. I set this layer to "soft light" as well. In the case of this piece, I also had to duplicate the layer and set it to "overlay". Once again, don't be afraid to play with layer opacity to get the strength and look you want!

After our above steps, this is where we are currently with our body prep. Notice I left the face alone when shading? That's because usually we need to blur the body shading more then we will need to with the face. Don't worry, that's next!

As promised, the face! For this I start with shadows like we did earlier and move to highlights. Repeat the same steps as you did for the body. I like to REALLY define that cheekbone and jaw when I do this.

Next, the highlights! Scrible, gaussian blur, set the layer to soft light... You get the drill!

Next, we focus on our eyes! We did this separate, as we blur this even less then we do the face! Scribble to define those eyelids, gaussian blur, soft light!

Repeat for the highlights...

And now we have a fully body prepped horse, Eps style!

With our horse body prepped, we can now focus on making white markings. As my stock is a buckskin and the horse we're mimicing has white legs from the tobiano, this will also include showing you how to get rid of those darker legs so it isn't obvious the horse had dark legs in your markings!

To start, create a copy of your horse's layer group. Merge this copied group into one image. I find it easiest to cut/copy pieces from this merged layer so I can keep the remaining layers of the original group! Makes me feel safer lmao.

Next, take your lasso tool (or as Krita calls it, the "Free Select" tool) and select your first chunk of white markings! Hand-draw it as best as you can. I like to have an image of the horse I'm mimicing in front of me so I can look back and forth.

This may be funny to hear me say, but let your hand be unsteady to it's hearts content! Making your line scribbly and uneven actually helps to make these markings look more natural then if they were to be smooth, pristine lines. Once you have your first chunk of white marking selected, this is what it should look like. Don't try to fit every marking in one selection!

Next, right click your selection and click "Cut to New Layer". You can copy too if you want, but I like to hide the cut layer so I can better see my marking chunks. It makes it easier on my singular brain cell. Now, hide the layer you cut and click back on your main horse layer. It should look like this, with a whole chunk of the horse missing!

Repeat the above step for all of your markings (even those pesky dark legs!). Once finished, highlight all of your cuts and merge them into one singular layer! Then drag this layer of cut markings to be at the top of the horse's group. Make sure you alpha lock it! Usually this doesn't matter, but sometimes you can get a weird, fuzzy outline effect where your marking layer is.

Now, use the HSL adjustment to reduce the saturation of the markings. IMPORTANT: Do not slide it to -100! You want to leave a smidge of the horse's original color. It will make the markings look more natural then if they were stark-white and greyscale.

Next, I use a Color Adjustment Curve to make our markings light! I do this instead of using the "lightness" slider in the HSL because it allows me to keep some definition in the light markings. Again, do not make these blindingly bright! Even white markings have shadows. c:

But Eps, you may ask. I can still see the difference between the body and legs in the white markings! Shhhhhhh. Take your lasso tool and select the dark parts of the legs. Then, use the "Feather Selection" setting. I like to set mine to about 10. This makes the edges of the selection a gradient, so it won't give a harsh line when we lighten the legs!

Use the Color Adjustment Curve again to lighten the legs to where they match with the rest of the white markings on the body! The back left leg was a little too bright, so I selected that manually and darkened it a smidge with the HSL Lightness slider.

To make the markings more natural, most would smudge the edges... Alas, as stated before, I'm a lazy fuck. As such, instead of manually smuding the edges, we are going to take the "Gaussian Blur" setting we have become so well-acquainted with in our body prep at a very, very low strength. Blur this too much and it will also blur all of our shadows in the horse and make it not match the rest of it!

Next, we go back to our shading steps and add back in a liiittle more definition, especially in those legs! Scribble, gaussian blur, soft light!!

Congratulations! You now have done white markings, Eps Style... Including those pesky dark legs!

This next part we will focus on the lighting of the horse, so we will need to take into account where the light source is going to be! This will further help to make our horse look like it belongs in the background.

To start, I take the same colors we used when shading and use a soft airbrush tool at a low opacity, usually around 30%-40%. Try to make the color more opaque where the horse will be the most shadowed!

Set the layer to "Multiply", lower the opacity to 10%-15%, duplicate the layer, and set this duplicate layer to "Soft Light". Play with the opacity of both layers to get the look you want!

Next, make even more shadows, but more concentrated to where the horse will be the darkest. This helps to add more depth!

Like before, set the first layer to Multiply at 10%-15% opacity, duplicate, and set to Soft Light.

Now, highlights! Since the lighting in my image is coming from the top, there is going to be a LOT of light hitting the horse, especially being in water, as the water reflects the light every which way! Use the same soft airbrush as we did with the shadows with the same opacity. Set this layer to Soft Light and play with the opacity to get the desired look you want.

Next, as we did with the shadows, go over the highlights again with the same color but in the areas where the light will be the most concentrated. Set this layer to Soft Light and play with the opacity.

Do this one more time, making the light even more concentrated and defined. Set this to "Overlay" and lower the opacity of the layer as needed! I used the Gaussian Blur setting to make my edges more feathered.

And thus we have our lighting for the horse complete!

In this piece, as I liked how it looked with wings in my head and to get another tutorial chunk done in the same piece to make my life easier, we will be adding wings! Select the wings for your piece. I like to try to make the lightness of the wing stock close to what I am going for, in this case white, as it makes my life a lot easier and I am, say it with me now, L A Z Y! Try to select stock from a bird that is flying/facing in the same direction as your horse. Cut out the wings from the bird and set them in the general area you want them to be in. I like to make each wing on a separate layer so I can erase the horse outline from the back wing and merge the two wings back into one layer.

This step is just showing you how I erase the outline. I click on my Horse group, go to select, and click "Select Opaque". I then shrink the selection by one pixel, go to my back wing layer, and use a hard brush to erase the wing so it looks like it is on the other side of the horse from where we are viewing the image.

This part is important to making your wings look like they are part of the horse's anatomy! Typically, the wing will merge into the top shoulder muscle/shoulder blade of the horse. After merging the two wings together, make a new group solely for working on the wings! I like to erase the base of the wing into a curve as shown with the green highlights. This lays out a base for how we will merge the wing into the shoulder of the horse.

As you can see, I have erased the parts of the wing that I don't need to achieve that curve! Try to erase so that the wing starts at a feather instead of a wonky partial feather. I leave a little chunk to help me blend the wing into the horse, which you will see me do momentarily.

Next, we take the smudge tool we used during our body prep and smudge the ever living shit out of that little chunk. I like to keep the top of the chunk mostly intact, as it acts as the start of the wing coming out of the shoulder of the horse, and go to town on the back and base of the chunk.

For this piece, I will be color changing the wing, as the wing starts in the tan section instead of the white. I do want the majority of the wing to be white, however. Take your lasso tool and select a random, scribbly-wobbly chunk of the wing. You can be as precise (or in my case, not) to matching it up with the feathers. Then, use the HSL Adjustment with the colorize box checked and change the color of the selection to match the horse's coat as best as you can. Don't worry if it isn't perfect, we will go in later to make the merge seamless.

Now, we spam the shit out of the eyedropper tool. The eyedropper tool is your friend! I honestly have no rhyme or reason to how I do this part. I simply use my hard, pressure-sensitive brush and scribble little lines between the start of the horse, over the chunk, and stopping at the base of the wing. Use the eyedropper tool to pull colors from the horse and chunk to blend the two together.

... And then, you guessed it: Gaussian Blur! (Who has time for manually smudging this stuff anyways?) I also extended the lil top of the leg marking up the wing portion a bit to continue that effort of blending the wing into the shoulder muscle/shoulder blade.

Now for this wing being so light, I want to add a liiittle more definition and depth into the different layers of feathers on the wing, as well as shade to better differentiate between the two wings. Take that same dark color we used for all of our other shading parts and scribble your shadows, just under the end of each layer of feathers. Gaussian Blur that and set the layer to Soft Light, and you should end up with something like this. This step is optional, and I only did it because I felt the wing lacked definition of it's feathers.

Now, take that same light color we used when shading and hand-draw little loops to make feathers. In the top of the wing I just kind of randomly drew little loops because I'm lazy, but further down I actually somewhat tried to match the feathers and outline them. Set this layer to Overlay.

I then took that same light color and used the soft airbrush to highlight the different layers of feathers. Gaussian Blur if you feel you need to.

I set that layer to Overlay and lowered the opacity of it to where I felt it looked right, and also bumped it beneath the layer where we individually outlined the feathers.

At this point, the white portion wings felt too greyscale for my liking I took my soft airbrush and used the eyedropper to pick a random light blue-grey color from the background. I then painted this over the white section of the wing. Set the layer to "Color" and lower the opacity as needed. I didn't want to completely change the wing to that color, I just wanted to tint it.

I then took the lighter color we used for our highlights and airbrushed it along the bottom layer of feathers to highlight them, as the light will be shining through them a little!

And thus we have completed our wings! These steps sometimes vary depending on the color of the wings and how closely they resemble the coat of the horse I'm going for.

Now for what you all have been waiting for... Hair! I use a brush that already makes hair-like strands, and is pressure sensitive with transparency, meaning the lighter the pressure the more transparent the stroke. I wish the brush also included size pressure sensitivity but unfortunately it doesn't.

To start, grab a good midtone color to be the base of the hair. For this piece, I wanted the hair to be silvery-white, so I grabbed a light grey from the white markings on the neck/shoulder of the horse. Typically you want to stay away from purely grey, unsaturated tones, as it tends to make your hair look flat and unnatural. Use the hair brush to lay down a good base for your mane and tail. I like to start with a 9px-12px brush depending on the size of the horse. In this case, the horse was smaller and more in the background, so I used a smaller brush size. Try not to make your strokes pencil straight! Hair is wavy and flowy, so let your brush strokes be wavy and flowy!

Next, use a smaller brush size to add little flyaway strands to add even more life into the hair. I like to use about a 3px brush. I also use this to taper the ends of the strands of hair better, since the brush I use doesn't have size pressure sensitivity.

Next step is me cleaning up my mess. Click on the group for the horse and use the selection setting to select opaque. Then use a hard brush to erase the hair where we were messy... In this case the ears, jaw, and neck/chest of the horse.

Now I take another hair brush that has a bunch of dots in a rectangle and use it to fill in the neck of the horse where the mane will be coming from the crest. You could probably use the same brush we used in the previous steps, but I've found it to be easier using the rectangle dot brush thingy.

And here is our final hair base completed! I accidentally did the tail's base before I remembered to take screenshots which is why it wasn't shown, so apologies for that... I'm not the best at making tails anyways compared to the manes. A good trick I found though is I start with making the tail first now and then do the mane. For some reason, my tails tend to look way better then when I would do the mane first and then the tail. If you struggle with manes more, then vice versa!

Take a color slightly darker then your base (NOT black! Never use black, or it will make your hair look flat!). We are going to use this and the small, 3px size hair brush to lay down our individual strands and define the flow of the hair. Don't worry if you make this color too dark, you can always lower the opacity to lighten it later on. Again, remember that hair is wavy and flowy! Let your hair strands be such.

Remember when I said don't worry about this color being too dark? I did just that and made my color too dark... So I lowered the opacity! Remember, I am going for a silvery-white mane and tail.

Here is where my hair technique gets lazy compared to others. Now take a slightly darker color then what you just used. In my case, since my color was too dark to begin with, I just used the color I had already selected. Start adding definition to the hair where light will be hitting it the least. In this case it will be any locations where the hair splits into two, and where the hair meets the body of the horse. For the tail, it is the underneath. Make darker strands, gradually making them smaller and smaller to help blend into the rest of the hair. We're trying to make it look natural! Don't use this darker color all over!

I repeated the above step with an even darker color to add even more depth. I also used a 2px size hair brush instead of 3px. I ended up lowering the opacity of this layer, but this allows you to sort of see what I mean by how I don't use this dark color all over and focus it only where light will hit the least.

Now, if you notice, the 2px looks pretty harsh and... Pixelated. As such, I used my handy-dandy Gaussian Blur setting at a very low intensity (I believe around .20-.40) to help undo that pixelation and also make the hair look softer overall.

Now take a color a little lighter then your base color and start laying down highlight strands where the light will hit the mane and tail! I used the 2px brush size for this, and also used the same Gaussian Blur settings as I did for the shadows above to help unpixelate the strands I drew.

Now, I did an oopsie and ended up making the hair too dark overall. I took that same color I used for the highlights and a large, hard brush and painted over the entirety of the mane and tail. I then set the layer to Soft Light and lowered the opacity until I got the correct tone and lightness of hair I was going for.

Now we go on to bulk shading the hair! This adds even MORE definition! Think of this like how we did the lighting for the horse earlier, and now we are doing that for the mane and tail! I started with my highlights first this time because it was the easiest to select from this background (This is the same color as we used for the highlights on the body of the horse!). Use the soft airbrush and paint where the light will hit the hair the most. Don't be afraid to change the size and opacity of the airbrush as needed to fit the size of hair chunks you are working with! Set this layer to Soft Light and play with the opacity to get the lighting where you like it.

Next we go on to shadows. Again, I used the same color as I used for the shadows on the horse's body. Use the same soft airbrush and paint where the light will be hitting the least. I set my layer to Multiply at 10%-15% opacity, duplicated it, and set the duplicate to Soft Light. Play. With. Layer opacities!

After my bulk shading, this is how it looked... But I still wanted to define the light EVEN further... Just a little more!

This next step is the cherry on top when it comes to lighting for your mane and tail. I use a brighter color, in this case a very light blue, ALMOST white. I go back in with that hair brush at 3px and make strands to mimic the light highlighting the hair even further. I then set that to overlay and played with the opacity.

This final step is SUPER important, as it makes the hair actually cast a shadow on the horse! Duplicate the hair group, merge the duplicate, and drag that merged layer down into the horse group. Then take the tool that moves your layers and move this to where it is slightly to the left or right depending on the direction of your lighting and slightly down. This will be the shadow your hair casts on the horse! Next, use the HSL and slide that lightness bar ALLLL the way to the left so the layer is completely black. I had to erase a few places where the shadow would not hit (Like the butt of the horse and the ears). Use Gaussian Blur to blur the shadow just slightly, mine was about 1.00, and set the layer to Soft Light. I ended up lowering the opacity of the layer as well.

And thus you have made a mane and tail for your horse, Eps style! I consider my method pretty lazy because most tutorials out there that I've seen tend to full highlight strands like I did for my step of defining the flow of the hair and individual strands. I found myself struggling to not overlap the light strands and it just made the entire thing look messy... And then I found Zomb's hair tutorial! This is actually heavily based off of Zomb's tutorial because they are a literal god. I'm just... Very lazy when it comes to making the light and shadow defining strands.

This part is really short and sweet compared to the others, but I felt I should include it since a lot of times making the eye is what causes my piece to really come to life! The horse is unfortunately pretty small so the eye wasn't able to have too much definition, but I did the best I could at showing the process.

To start, I use a hard brush at a small size and use a black color to fill in the eye to give myself a blank canvas to work with.

Next we will define the iris. Although my subject horse has brown eyes, I absolutely hate doing brown eyes on horses... And this piece is blue-heavy in the background, so I decided to make the eye blue. Find a good middle-tone base color. You want to have a lot of saturation here, and not too light or too dark. Create a group for the eye with this layer as the base to make our lives easier shading the eye. Using this color, draw a half-circle shape, as shown.

Now we start to shade the eye. Since my eye is blue, I grabbed a dark navy color and used alpha lock so I'm only shading that half-circle. (See why I said in the beginning that groups make our lives so much easier with alpha lock?) I used a hard brush that was only pressure sensitive for opacity, not size, that I can build up on itself. I also lowered the opacity of my brush to make it easier to build without making it too dark right off the bat. Focus this dark color near the top edges of the half-circle.

Next I took a lighter, almost white blue and focused this near the center/middle of the half-circle using the same brush as before. I set this layer to overlay to get that drastic color and lighting difference and lowered the opacity as needed.

This next step is probably the most important to making your eye look realistic that I see most people miss completely... Adding that little glare! Usually you want to use a light, almost-white color that is on the opposite side of the color wheel from the color of your eye. Since my eye is blue, I used a light tan. Use a hard brush and very lightly draw in your glare. I like mine to follow the top of the eye... Usually in a slight curve opposite the iris we did earlier. Blur this and mess with the opacity as needed to achieve the look you want.

And thus our eye is complete! Again, I feel like this is usually the simplest yet biggest step when it comes to making my piece look realistic.

And now we come to the very last part of our manipulation... Grounding your horse and making them look like they belong in your background! This can sometimes be the make it or break it of manipulations. You can have a gorgeous horse, but if you don't ground them and make them fit with the background, then your piece looks flat and one-dimensional.

The first thing I like to do is use the Color Adjustment Curve setting to increase the contrast in my background image. Play with the curves to get it to your liking.

For this background, I wanted to make the highlights REALLY pop, so I went back in with the same setting and focused solely on the highlights while leaving the shadows alone.

Now onto my favorite part of grounding... Blurring the background! I used to not blur my background too heavily but recently with examining art others have made such as Zephyr, Polaresta, and especially Zomb (can you tell which artists I idolize? xD) I noticed they tend to heavily blur the background... So I tried it myself and loved how it looked! To start, I use the normal "Blur" function instead of Gaussian Blur. I usually set it to about 4 or 5. This will be our heavy blur for the very, very far away portion of the background (in this case, the forest and mountains). DO NOT HIT OKAY! Hit the button that says "Create Filter Mask".

The reason "Create Filter Mask" is important, is because it allows us to erase some of the blur to focus it where we want it! I like to use the soft airbrush at a large size in ERASE MODE. Using this, I erase the blur from my midground and foreground (in this case, the lake).

Next we will repeat that process to blue the middle and foreground so we can focus the area the horse is in. I shrank my airbrush a little and lowered the opacity so I could be more precide with erasing the blur. I erased only around where my horse was standing and a little bit in front, closest to where the "viewer" is to create a more focused lens look. This also will blur your background even more to make it look even farther away! Yay!

This step is only important if your horse is in water. As such, we want to create ripples where our horse becomes submerged. I have a ripple brush that makes this easy for me, but you can also do this with a hard brush at a small size. Using a light blue from the water, focus it heavily where the legs and tail go into the water. This will also serve to hide the line where we chopped off the poor pony's legs. Make this layer on top of everything we have done so far in all of our steps!

I lowered the opacity of this layer, leaving it set to "Normal".

Duplicate our ripple layer, set it to "Overlay", lower the opacity, and then Gaussian Blur the original layer that is set to "Normal". Ripples are reflections of light against peaks of mini waves. As such, we only have to worry about light and not shadow! Yay!

This next series of steps is where we would create the "shadow" of the horse... Since our horse is in water, it will instead be a reflection. Select your Horse, Wings, and Hair groups. Duplicate them all, keeping the duplicated groups selected now.

Merge those groups into one layer! This layer will have the Horse, Wings, and Hair all in one.

Drag this new layer down to the very bottom of all of our layers and groups so that the only thing beneath it is our background.

Now go to Layer > Transform > Mirror Layer Vertically. In a normal piece, we would use HSL to slide the lightness all the way to -100 to make the image black for the shadow, and use the movement tool that allows you to stretch and angle the layer to create your horse's shadow. In this case, though, we need the reflection for the water! I had to rotate the reflection slightly so that the legs all lined up correctly.

Next, I lowered the opacity of the reflection so it wasn't so bright and used the Blur > Create Filter Mask function to blur the reflection where the bottom of the image was. I did this because my background was slightly blurred, and it would look weird to have the reflection pristine where my background was blurred since, of course, my reflection of the horse is supposed to be a part of the background!

Now that our reflection is complete, we also need to have our horse still cast a slight shadow on the water. To do this, take a hard brush and a completely black color and scribble a thin oval directly beneath the horse. It doesn't have to be perfect!

Now we use our beloved Gaussian Blur and blur the ever living fuck out of the black oval blob, as so. Keep cranking up that blur intensity until you get the feathering you want.

I then lowered the opacity of our shadow. Isn't playing with layer opacity fun?

Next, we move onto lighting for the sunlight. This will be at the verrry tippy top of our giant mass of layers and groups. I like using a sun flare-style brush. If you don't have one, you can create the same look by using a hard brush, making triangles, and using Gaussian Blur to mimic the sun glare shown below because words are hard and I honestly have no idea how to describe that shape lmao.

I set that layer to soft light, duplicated it, and set the duplicate to overlay. I then played with the opacity of those two layers until I achieved the look I wanted.

Finally, I wasn't completely satisfied with how the sun flare looked, so I used another style of sun flare and set it to overlay as well. This one is more of a spiky circle then it is triangles. I also used Gaussian Blur on this layer so it wasn't as harsh of lines.

And thus our piece is complete! If you made it this far, congrats xD I hope these tutorials helped! 💕

- Before -

- After -

Wow, Eps, thank you SO much! ❤️