How to Draw a Horse simply

Hello my name is Paul Priestley and today I'm going to be showing you how to draw a horse by simply using circles and curves. This is an ideal starting point for beginners and those with a little more experience of drawing. The horse will be drawn on its side to keep it simple. To start the horse I'm just going to use two circles. So we're just going to sketch those circles out nice and simply here. Another circle here. Yes very very very lightly and what I'm going to do is to square, put a square around here because that's going to give me the size of or the length of the leg. So if I can do a square around here I'm doing it very very faintly. You may not be able to see this but I'm just going to draw that down there and then just draw a little line along there and that will give me the length of the legs. From here I'm going to draw a triangle just very very lightly sketching a triangle shape. Just give me the neck of the horse. You can see it's narrower than the body. I'll put a little block on the end here and just a slight block on here too. So I'm just going to very very gently sketching out these shapes. The horse does not stand on its front legs absolutely vertically. It tends to put them back slightly. So I'm going to take a line from here. I'm just going to bring the line slightly leaning back with triangle shape on the bottom and a circle round about halfway down for the joint of the leg. The same applies at the back and start with a line here. It comes down at an angle like this and comes down to a triangle shape round about there. So I've got my very simple basic shape for my horse. Now to work on this now I'm going to develop this and work over it and curve the lines. So we'll start with the head. I've got the two ears which I'll put in here. The horse's head just curve this down very very very slightly. Bring it round at the front here. Curve it along slight curve around the back here. Curve down to the circle. Down to the circle here and at the back here also nicely curved. So a nice curve along the back there too. Bring that curve down across the shoulders down around the back and round. So I've got that sort of basic structure. With the legs, the top of the legs are quite powerful for the horse. So I'm going to bring the curve from around about here. I'm going to bring it down slightly around the little bump down here. Round the back there. A curve and do the same for the front. Bring the curve down at the front. Down around the curve here. Down to the bottom and shoe. So I've got my basic leg for the horse. Do the same thing at the back. I'm going to start the back here. I come down the back of the leg over the bump. Down the back again and the curve and similarly the front part of the leg. Start around the circle. Down to my little section down here. Bring it down. Round. So we've now got basic legs there. The curve of the horse, depending on what sort of horse it is, the stomach can curve this way or curve that way. I'll bring mine in so it curves just a little curve along there like that. Okay now the other legs. If you imagine this as an arc. So we can spin along those two points. This will give us the marks for the other knees. So if I for example take this, spin it round here. I've got my other circle maybe would be about there and my triangle on the bottom. Just drawing very lightly and I'm going to bring the leg forward here. More or less from the same position. So it comes out over the bump. Down and round and similarly from the bottom here comes out around the shape. So we have the leg at the front. This leg here, similar sort of thing. If you can imagine the arc that it swings through. So the other circle maybe possibly round about here as it's swinging through. Maybe touch higher and again I bring the line down from the back around the bump. Down and finish. Just finish it a little shorter because the leg's further back. Curve again from the top here. Comes down around my circle. Down across the front. So I have my back leg. So I've got my basic shape now for the two legs. I'm going to just put a few little lines at the back here just to represent the tail. And just to finish the horse off now we will do a few, a little bit of shading. Maybe you put an eye in probably around about here. A little nose perhaps along the bottom there. Going to shade. I'm only going to do this very very quickly just so you can see the basic idea. But I'm going to shade the back legs first. And the reason I do that is because as I shade the back legs it makes that leg look as though it's further away than the front leg. So it pushes it back. I do the same with this leg here. I'm creating an edge here. Look you see taking the shading back and shading down here. If the light's coming from above then I would have my shading along the bottom here. Gradually getting lighter and lighter as it comes up. I can do the same then with this cylinder around the neck. It's going to be darker underneath the neck here for example. Might come down along the leg possibly. Maybe a little bit of shading down by the leg here and so on. Now if you're doing the shading you want to do this properly. We need to get rid of the outlines. But I'm just doing a very very quick little sketch here just to give you an idea of where we might do the shading. Just to give you a bit of an idea. So the same applies over this side here. A little bit of shading just around the back here down the back leg and so on. Right down to the bottom there. A little few lines down the back. It might have a mane on here so you can possibly give a few little lines maybe for the mane. And we can more or less leave that as it is. As I say you would be better off trying to get rid of the outlines if you can. Okay that's the end of this little sketch here. 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