I realized it had been a long time since I have hand drawn a horse and I was bored while at work. Since i happen to bring my sketchbook with me to work (but totally forgot my actual art stuff) I present to you this poneh:

Time: 1.5 to 2 hours

Materials:

- Strathmore toned gray sketchbook (9in x 12in) (I need to get a new one since there are only like two or three pages left DX)

- mechanical pencil (it was probably bought from walmart, it is just one of those classic school mechanical pencils lol)

- white prismacolor colored pencil (used for highlights when I got home - I have the 72 box)

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it's definitely not perfect and there are some things I need/want to change but i dont think its too awful haha

That is gorgeous 😍 And yo a mechanical pencil?! You are too talented for this Earth =)

Haha thank you Whiz! It was honestly such a challange. I wanted to murder the pencil, believe me XD

Wow. 0.o

I work in an office at a college here in Washington and its become a thing where I do whiteboard art (and am asked to paint our windows and stuff) to make people happy. I try to incorperate and be considerate to as many different cultures as possible when making this art. Usually I use color and I may go back in and add color to this when its done, im honestly not sure. But here is a WIP of my recent piece work that I started yesterday in between meetings (I have been to Seattle, you can see my attempt at the Seattle skyline in one of the lower bubbles. I also think I am going to change the fish to black with a white shine/highlight and I need to fix the cup but its getting there - oh and the ship isn't done yet. I just did what I could in the time that I had, and I'm also pretty short so I can't reach the very top of the board, hence the odd, shorter looking trees at the top of the top bubble. I intended for them to be taller.):

I am getting ready to move to go off to Uni but am trying to do a few premades and horse practice since it has been a while since I did a horse digital painting. Here is a sketch of something I am working on. I am going for a bit of a "highstrung" arabian sort of look without the super dished face (i am not a big fan of deeply dished faces on arabians). But honesty it could probably pass for a sport horse. I still can't decide how I want the mane and tail angled and am not entirely sold on the position of the ears (which you can see me messing with in blue). Since this is just a practice, I probably won't sell it and will keep it as an OC or put it on one of my new Arabian fillies (I am trying to switch over to AA). But who knows. I do know for sure that it will be a bay or chestnut. I'm also not sure how I will do the background. I am thinking maybe a desert with dunes or possibly a forest sort of scene or field of flowers? Any ideas?

So i decided I am going to post each step here so you all can see my process. I will be editing this post as I go and adding a brief description of what I am doing. Since I am editing it in real time, I may take breaks in between posts. I would honestly like to be able to post time lapses or GIFs so you all can see it and I've had interest in the past from others and made a now very outdated tutorial but I can't figure out how to do that. So for now this will be what I do I guess lol.

1. Sketches (as seen above): sketching is just done using basic shapes as seen above and then on another layer I add in all the details like where I want shadows and highlighs since I like planning it all out ahead of time even if I don't have an exact background in mind. I can always edit lighting later but I like knowing where everything is anatomically. So really it is just where the highlights and shadows should be based on the muscle groups and bone structure.

2. Base color: on a new layer I add the base color which is a "middle" or medium color in my color palette. I have decided to go with a bay/flaxen liver chestnut/seal colored horse since I haven't really done those beautiful colors yet. Honestly any of those colors could work here, its the mane and tail colors that will really determine the horse coat color "name." And I really dont care about that right now since I haven't entirely decided how I want to position the mane and tail yet anyways... It doesnt matter how you do it, the base color just needs to be solid and I like to use a hard brush. Otherwise it will end up being seethrough from the colors being pushed around on the canvas and it causes so many problems later.

3. Darks/Shadows: Ok so now is the step around which everything just goes a little crazy so that is why the darks are pretty much only half done. What I do is I use a basic round brush (I guess it would be considered a soft or medium round brush) that tapers and fades when I draw depending on the pressure. This is pressure-opacity. I use a Huion drawing tablet. All you do here is add in the darks and the basic depths so you know where things are. Edit: So I realized I wasn't super detailed with this explanation because I was hungry and ordered food for dinner and it was delivered so I hurried lol so i am adding onto it.

Basically what you're going to do or what I like to do is take a dark color, a very dark brown usually (Never ever use black, it just never looks right. If you are shading a black horse, use a dark blue). And what I do is I go in and mark those dark, shadowy areas. I blend these out later using a "wet" brush (I use the program Krita at the moment but might switch to PS since I get it free through my University) and these wet brushes are hardly ever smooth. I like texture and images need texture to not look so flat so I use a textured wet brush when blending these out. Which brings me to the next step (you don't want to blend these darks out until you have some lights on there. Otherwise the blending will be pointless and not blend with the lights properly).

4. Highlights and details: If you haven't noticed, I jump around a lot haha. Ok so here I am working on the face of the horse and will work from face to tail. I added in where I wanted face markings (drawing inspiration from my horse Major's markings) since it looked a bit plain without some face markings. After doing that, I began shading in more areas of the face with highlights. They honestly blend perfectly with the base color which is why I always use that medium color for the base. Before adding in any of the highlights I actually put down the gray on the muzzle since horse muzzles are hardly ever the color of the body. I don't really know how to explain it... they are normally a shade of pink or grey or black. I went for gray with this horse because of the coat color I am going for. When choosing the rest of the colors, I went through and I looked at the tone of brown I am using. The base color brown is more on the red side which means I am using warmer tones overall. So i am staying in the yellows, and oranges, and reds when it comes to the browns and grays. I wanted to add tones of the copper bay you'd find on my horse Rizu since I thought they would make decent accent/pops of light colors. And then a sort of yellow/orange toned gray for additional highlights. Never use white. Again, like black, it won't look right. I also added the eye in and a little bit of pink on the muzzle/nose area since when horses have white markings on their noses, they are not really white, its more pink and I wanted it to be realistic. Also, something to note is that I do all of my shading on the same layer. I use to do them on separate layers but they just never blended quite right. Basically I will be doing this for the entire body. This whole process. And then I go back in and add fine details and tweak the image. I will continue adding update/process photos here as I go so you all can see up until the background and I will post background process photos with other tutorial explanations. The face alone took me about an hour to do.

did the neck and added some dapples/lace (not sure which it counts as to be entirely honest). I love this pattern on horses. Rizu has little dapples/marks on her side from the look of it and i love the lace pattern some seal brown horses have so I added those as a small but necessary detail. Honestly you dont need them, I just happen to like them and haven't drawn them in a very long time.

added shoulder and body base layers before dapples. I have a little more work to do on the barrel/belly area but the dapple area is ready for the most part. To make a lot of these colors that are different from others, I've been mixing them off to the side so I know they'll blend well and so they match better. I kind of treat it like an oil or acrylic painting in that aspect.

Alrighty I am done for the day. Added some more dapples and details. I am sure I will be back and fixing a lot of things tomorrow since it's late here and probably doesnt look as great as I think it does right now XD. Currently I've put maybe 6 hours into it. As you all can probably see, I put a lot of time into these pieces. Its a major reason why i am not posting to my DA as much anymore - I had a couple of art pieces stolen from me and reposted to twitter by someone who claimed them as their own and DA did nothing about it (another DA member sent me a message saying they forced the other person to take it down). Anyways, enough of that rant XD In the meantime, I will be thinking about how I'm going to do this horse's mane.

double post

I love your whiteboard art piece <3

Thank you tons! I ended up finishing it but forgot to post it here. I dont even remember if I took a photo or not. I erased it and ended up doing a new piece for May Fourth since my supervisor wanted me to do a sort of holiday piece. She asked me to go in on my day off and everything to do it lol. I would post it but I dont think I can because of credits/fan art rules. Similarly, I would love to post my 5 year art progress photos (of Katniss Everdeen when I was first starting photorealism and getting serious about art) but, again, crediting. I have a ton of whiteboard art stored on my phone though haha and appreciate your support <3