How to Paint a Realistic Horse | Portrait Painting | Time-lapse Acrylic Painting

Whenever we think of portraits the first thing that comes to our mind is a human face with pretty eyes and some other expressive facial features that we try to depict in our photographs or paintings. But often we overlook the natural beauty of some animal portraits only because they don't pose like us or they don't use any sort of cosmetics to enhance their facial characters. So today I'm going to paint the portrait of a horse using acrylics and in the process I will also try to share a few tips for painting animal portraits. Hey guys I'm Satyajit and you are watching Satyajit's Artwork. So without a further ado let's get started. Initially what I have done is I have used a mixture of burnt sienna mixed with a bit of permanent orange to create a base tone to overcome the white of the paper. Now I'm just trying to map in the basic structure of this horse and you can see that at this stage I'm using a flat brush with relatively loose strokes to depict the basic shapes and I'm also not very much concerned about the exactness of the colors at this stage of painting. You might be thinking that I have messed up the whole drawing but it doesn't matter as long as I can follow the suggestive pathways of my initial drawing. Now you can see that I'm slowly trying to build the anatomy of the face which contains a lot of variations and I'm also more concerned about the exactness of the colors at this stage. The other important tip that I can share with you is to look for the different textures to make the skin look more realistic. Now that doesn't mean you have to paint each individual fur. No, not at all. You just have to pay attention on certain patterns and the shift in colors so that it looks as a whole and not just individual swamp of colors stick together. I'll just work like this in order to paint the other areas as well. So now I have just started to paint around the eye and it doesn't matter whether you are painting a human face or an animal. The eyes are the soul of the portrait so you must give extra emphasis while painting the eyes. In this case, the eyes are a bit muted. Now why I'm saying muted is because the eyes are blending with the background which is also in a darker tone but there are still some variations in the eyes and also some glazes which makes the eyes look lifelike and three-dimensional. So you must look for that. Now I have started working on the nose of this horse and I must admit that it is the trickiest part in this whole painting although it was also very exciting to paint because of the huge variations in the colors and the overall look of the nose. At initial sight, it looks very much like a dark tone of gray but there are a lot of variations in the colors including some purple, blue which you can only realize looking up close. Now I will just work in the similar fashion to complete this whole area. The other important aspect of this area was the texture which I didn't try to slavishly copy from my reference rather I try to understand the texture of that particular area and paint accordingly. Now I'm just working on the mane of this horse which is mostly black mixed with a tinted purplish tone which is bringing the whole piece together. For the background, I choose to paint it very loose and sketchy to create a contrast with the detailed subject and the colors which I used are mostly black mixed with a bit of orange, crimson lake and cobalt blue and with that I have almost reached to the end of this painting where I am just tweaking some values here and there and also painting the thin whiskers of the nose. And here is the finished piece guys. I hope this video was helpful and you learned something out of it. Hey guys thanks a lot for watching. If you want to support my work then please do like, comment and share my works and also don't forget to subscribe to my channel and hit the bell icon which is very important so that you get notified as soon as I post a new video.