Drawing is Failing at Horses

Drawing is failing at horses.

Then looking at horses and thereafter failing better. 

So after drawing a few inanimate objects from observation, you should start to get the hang of light and dark and geometry and space, and you will start to build your confidence in drawing. And then you go and draw an animal and it feels like you are back to square one!

What happened to all those skills and why is my horse so so rubbish?

First things first. 

Adults have seen, if not in real life, at least in pictures and documentaries a huge amount of different animals repeatedly. Although we are not aware of this, our brains are collecting little bits of information about each of those as shapes, which are species specific, which is why we can identify many different animals by their silhouettes. We have a vast inner visual library, but unless we observe actively, our drawings from imagination for each species will make us slightly dissatisfied.  We will know that there is something amiss, but it will be harder to pinpoint exactly what. 

When you draw a chair, a table or a teddybear, you are drawing an object that is not moving. You can take all the time in the world to observe light bouncing off its surface and transfer that onto your piece of paper or screen. Although a chair, a table or a teddybear requires structure to not crash in a pile, that structure can have multiple shapes and still be understood as that thing. Objects that we use everyday that we go on to include in out still lives (when we draw a few inanimate objects in a little composition) tend to have quite visible and variable structures. We can see the legs that prop up the table, the stem that props up the flower, the curve that props ups the bottle. And those legs, stems and curves come in a huge range of shapes and sizes. So even if our drawn table legs are a little bit out of proportion, the drawing could still be read as table, the variety in our inner library makes even the different legs believable. 

But when it comes to animals, the structures that keep them (us) propped up are quite complex and unique. And of course while they are alive they are in constant movement, which is a real challenge for drawing because the shapes and surfaces that make them up are constantly changing!

The simpler the animal, the easier to understand the structure, so for example invertebrates such as caterpillars and worms we can see as a collection of segments that form tubes. Insects have exoskeletons (their hard bits are on the outside), and because their outside structure is rigid, from the drawing point of view, it is a simpler problem to resolve. But complex mammals like horses, giraffes or your sister, are made up of an inner skeleton, muscles, ligaments, fat, and skin partially covered by hair.  Successfully rendering the shape of living mammals, takes a lot more practice, because each of those layes has an effect on the surface that we draw.   In art schools it is quite common to have Life Drawing classes. This is where students draw a model who holds poses for increasing amounts of time.  This is quite useful because this allows us time to actively look (remember drawing is looking!) and learn about the different geometries and curvatures of skin over particular parts of the body. Illustrators are constantly looking at people when they are out and with practice can do a fast render that still holds quite a lot of information, even if not on the spot. Animals, however, will not pose for you, so you have to look and work fast. 

In our failing at horses drawing exercise we will first draw an adult horse sideways from our imagination/memory. This by the way, applies to any animal. Do not look at a horse, or a picture of a horse at this stage. 

After you have drawn the horse let’s review it:

So let’s think about what we know about a horse rationally: It’s a hairy mammal that stands in four legs, has along face, a long tail, pointy ears at the top of it’s head, two eyes, big nostrils, little mouth. It has longer hair in parts, particularly the tail. (Did you know sting instrument’s bows are made with horse tail’s hair?) It’s taller than a person, the one I’m imagining is. 

Now let’s consider what we know about drawing a horse: If you looked at a horse just standing tall minding it’s own business and you drew and outline box around the whole horse sideways, would it be a a square, a wider than tall rectangle, a taller than wide rectangle?

Your horse should have four legs, ah, but where in those legs are the joints? How much of the horses height makes up the legs? The torso? The neck and head? What shape are those legs? Are the front and back legs the same? What is at the end of those legs? What shape is the ribcage? What shape is the neck? 

While you have been pondering all this things the real life hose would be in a different position now, but you would still be able to look and record the answers to all of those questions. Those questions are dealing with proportion, in other words how the part relates to the whole. 

Now open your browser and do an image search for horses, unless there happens to be a horse you can see from your window, that would be ideal!

Of course not all horses are the same shape, and as each moves the shapes we see would change, but they do have some common characteristics that would make them distinctive from a giraffes, zebras, donkeys  and from your sister! Every horse we draw will possess the lessons we have learned from reviewing our past horse attempts against an actual horse, and thus every drawing will get close and closer, more horselike, until one day you will draw a horse (without a rider or a carriage or any other props) that will instantly be recognised as a horse by other people. 

Then you should celebrate with a slice of carrot cake and share it on line.