Lunameyza

Hi everyone!

I hope you're in the mood to draw a majestic horse portrait, because that is this month's tutorial theme, sponsored by DeviantArt! If you follow along and create your own horse portrait, make sure to submit your deviation with the hashtag #HorseHeadTutorial to earn the profile badge:

Tools

I'm drawing this horse portrait digitally in Photoshop, but I'm sure you can follow along with any digital art program you use. You can also draw traditionally, though maybe some improvisation is needed in some steps, but you got this!

I used only three brushes for this artwork, starting with a simple hard brush for the sketch, and two textured brushes for the colouring and the background. However, you could really use any brush you're comfy with

Step 1. Let's start this portrait with the simple shapes of the head (consisting of the cheek and nose area) and the shoulders and neck. It's good practice to work rather quickly in this first rough stage, so your view on it stays 'fresh', making it easier to spot anatomical mistakes. I recommend using one or multiple reference photo's!

Step 2. Now we place the eyes, nostrils and ears. The horse's head is in a slight angle, so the outer eye is visibly standing out a bit, and the outer nostril is not completely visible either. To make sure all is aligned, you can check by placing a line between the eyes. The ears and nostrils should be on parallel lines.

Step 3. Take another good look at your reference(s) (or this sketch, of course!) and add details to your horse. Start with adding the edge of the jaw, below the eye. It's good to keep in mind where the general muscles and bone structures are (shown in blue), this helps to define where light and shadows will be hitting later on in the process. Because the horse is slightly bending its neck towards us, some wrinkles.

Tip: Flip your canvas! You've been staring a while at your horse now, making it harder to spot things that look off. Flipping your canvas helps to refresh your view on your art. If you're drawing on paper, you could hold it against a window.

Tip 2: Feel free to erase parts you did in the previous steps, or move parts. A useful tool in Photoshop is 'Liquify' (shortcut CTRL + Shift + X), with this tool you can move parts around or make them smaller or bigger.

Step 4. One of my favourite parts: Adding manes! Create a new layer and give your horse the manes you prefer: Straight, wavey, short, long, maybe even a cool short shaved cut like Fjord Horses often have.

If you're going for wavey manes, start with some big locks with some bends in them to the left and right. Make sure the orange and blue marked bends are not lining up next to each other exactly, to make sure the manes look natural. Then add some more hairs and variation and a few short hairs sticking out. Try to keep the manes in one big general shape.

Now you've finished your horse sketch, awesome!

Step 5. Time to add the base colours! I like to add a sepia-like background tone, which I loosely draw with a textured brush. Then make a new layer under your sketch and give your horse one colour. Now lock that layer, and add some more colour variations. This is a bay horse, so the nose and around the ears they're coloured a bit greyish. Don't be afraid to use outspoken colours, I've used blue tones for the manes and nose/eye area, and a bright blue dot in the eye, reflecting the sky.

Tip: Where the mane locks are bending to the left, is the where you want to add some highlights.

Step 6. Now I start adding a little bit of highlights and shadows. In this phase I try to keep in mind: Where is the light coming from? What is the shape of this area I'm drawing? What kind of texture and roughness does this substance have? If there is a highlight, what colour is it reflecting and why?

For example, I'm going with blue-ish highlights because I imagine the horse might not be in direct sunlight, but the sky is blue. For shadows I also use darker shades of blue, maybe the setting is evening or late afternoon. So the intensity of colours, and the warmth, depends on the surroundings. Adding a background is optional, but I do have a certain setting in mind in order to add highlights and shadows.

Step 7 (optional). Make your horse unique! Horses can have so many different and awesome markings, you can create some for your horse on a new layer. Use an off-white colour, but markings that show up on the nose, are a bit orange/pink coloured because there are less hairs on the nose, showing more of the skin. And if a horse has a marking near their hair line, it shows in the manes!

Step 8 (optional). Since this is a horse portrait tutorial, I won't dive too deep into making a background, and you don't need to add one either. I like to add a background for some context to the horse, and make the horse blend into the total picture. For this background I simply made a new layer, clipping masked it to the sepia toned background layer, and started out with some blobs for the sky and bushes. Then, all using the same textured brush, I added some detail to it, while still keeping it simple and suggestive.

Step 9. Now the most fun part: Merging all horse layers and drawing on top of it! This step is all about adding detail, colour and just adding the final touches. In this step we're also rendering away most of the horse line art. You can also play around with hue, saturation and contrast, but don't overdo it

And you're done, good job!

Submit your final piece as deviation, add #HorseHeadTutorial and earn that profile badge!

🐴 Don't forget: There's a Q&A event on June 10th @ 9AM PST here ! So don't forget to comment on that journal and ask me questions! 🐴

Then you can ask me about my art, technique, tips and tricks or anything you'd like to know. See you there!