First tutorial:
Hooves, Front legs, Chest to Neck Connection and Muscling
Style: Sideview
Step One
Get your basic shapes down, or the "skeleton" of your drawing down. This will help keep you on track and know what it is you will be drawing. Start with the big shapes, like the chest in this image, then do light lines to define the leg position. Try your best to keep the height of the legs and the chest-wither the same height (:
When you progress on your drawing, remember this is like the roughdraft of an essay, nothing here is set in stone and will most likely change as you go.
Step Two
This is where you will be shaping the legs out, giving them life and a muscle structure. I love thick, stocky horses so I always poke out those biceps and make those chests nice and wide lol, but feel free to play with sizes, Arabs are also fun to draw with their super thin cannon bones, it gives them a delicate and dainty look! For the hocks, I always make them poke out to give them that rounded bone look because all horses have that. But if you're gonna have floofy feet on the horse, dont worry too much about that.
Anyways, during this step, just get your imagined shape you desire for your horse, is it gonna be thin, stocky, malnourished or boney (also a cool aspect for any horror-related OCs out there). Just have fun!
Step Three
The hooves!! My personal favorite yet other's worst nightmare xD
That's what practice does to ya folks, the more you hate it, means the more you should do it, which results in the more you learn to love it!
First off, when you are struggling ALWAYS look to a close-up hoof reference photo! This helps tremendously when you are learning, and also keep in mind the position you are putting your horse in! That small detail of the position will change everything in your drawing. With that being said, look closely at the difference between the lifted leg's hoof and the standing leg's hoof. The ankle is different! The standing is resting forward while the other is dipped inward and the indent between hock and hoof is smaller. You'll also notice that I draw my hoof outlines like an h, which is exactly what the shape is, right?
Feel free, to practice just the hoof shape using the letter "h" as practice, this is what I did in school a lot lol
Step Four
This is probably the easiest part, just draw a line underneath the hoof! I am only posting this as a separate step because I see and hear a lot of people struggle with this, which I can understand as a perfectionist lol. I have learned to give that simple line a slight arc outward, especially on lifted hooves. Give more of a curve for lifted hooves, and less for the one that are landed.
Step Five
This is where I like to flesh out my horse even further and define the shapes of the knees. I go for soft squares, but I've seen people do circles and it turns out a similar way (:
Give yourself some artistic freedom and figure out your knee cap style is!
Step Six
This is my fun muscle-up buttercup stage! Like I said earlier, I love me some chunk-a-monks! So of course, gotta get those muscles in. Just use a close-up ref and determine the shape and definition your drawing needs, I like dramatic muscles, but not everyone likes this so explore a bit and try things out!
You'll also notice how I draw the chest pecs, which is basically an upside-down heart at this angle, but this changes with different positions and horse body styles.
Also, notice the neck shape. Thick down at the base and connect it subtly to the withers, it doesn't cover the withers most of the time unless its some really muscled horses or horses in strangely high neck positions. Then as it nears the cheek, it gets thinner. Always do this with your "rough-draft" drawing in step one, the only reason I didn't do this is because I had very limited space on my paper, but I will demonstrate this in another tutorial (:
Lastly...
Here is a little GIF I made for you to save if needed to use as future references!
Be sure to click the Subscribe button to get updates and more tutorials in the future! Hope this helps! And I'd love to see any drawings you make that used these few methods of mine ❤️
Stay safe and healthy y'all!
Clear with Temps dropping into the Teens
