simply-m-a-d

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ballads of breeze 🍃

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wanderer day <3

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💧 twitter | ig | inprnt | patreon | store

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Teaching discipline

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Hey!!! You made a "how to draw wings" sheet, but— how on Earth do you draw horse!?!? The bane of every artists existence

Yeahhh horses are hard. They have lots of little nuances on top of complex anatomy and weird ass shapes (literally and figuratively). Drawing them requires lots and lots of practice. And this is like...entire art book levels of subject matter but here are a few tricks that I've picked up over time -

Key body shapes - shoulder, barrel, hip

I won't go too far into this one because Ken Hultgren does a much better job in his book The Art of Animal Drawing. But TL;DR - a horse's body has three main masses - the shoulder, the barrel, and the hip. Each one is tricky to draw on it's own since they're all weird shapes, but it's helpful to me to break a horse body down into simpler terms.

Key muscle masses

When I draw horses, I like to emphasis curves vs straights. Horses have that built in naturally as their body is often either "pure muscle" or "pure bone". There's some really nice details at the intersections of body parts, like at the front elbow and behind the ears along the neck (aka the "poll") where there's highly definable muscle groups that can help with visual clarity.

Fun fact, young horses grow hip-first. The horse in the photo above is 8 years old. That same horse at 4 years is below. Cracks me up how much taller his hip was at the time.

Ok so the muscles on the front legs combined with the shoulder mass is a fave combo of mine. The shoulder mass itself is something that I've found that is particularly horse-ish. For me, it's a pretty big visual signifier - almost more important than the neck. You can show a lot of tension/action in the body with the shoulder depending how you simplify it. Horses use their shoulders A LOT (too much if you ask any dressage rider or reiner), so emphasizing the shoulder can make a horse more expressive.

Legs. Oh heavens, the legs.

Yeah ok so again, Hultgren goes into fantastic detail on legs and hooves (I still follow how he simplifies hooves to this day my gosh that guy is a genius), but I often break them down like this for quick sketching. Are horse's legs realistically this emphasized? No, but I like the visual language; believable but expressive. This can apply to any size/shape from arabians to drafts.

And finally...

A few head details -

Overall horses have SO many variables. The fun part about that is that they're highly customizable and able to be endlessly stylized. The tough part is that they're hard to draw strictly because of all of the little things to keep track of to make sure the horse reads as "horse".

And so because third time's the charm, Ken Hultgren's Art of Animal Drawing really is one of the best I've seen for breaking down, simplifying, and applying horse anatomy to active drawings.

But most of all, the more you draw horses the easier they'll be.

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through all the blood and hate,

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Two halves that together complete wholeness

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Take you for a ride

By Old Xian

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So that Barbie meme …

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more of that cql/mdzs modern au

Bonus:

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they mean the world to me your honor

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I can’t begin to explain how much the development of Kanda and Allen’s relationship means to me oh my god…Hoshino portrayed it so beautifully in this chapter; Allen opening up and telling his story for the first time and it’s for Kanda, Kanda patiently listening and the way he seems to direct himself to Allen in a much gentler way…and then both of them still having that silly side towards each other no matter how much they’ve grown…im sobbing oh my god…

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walk home

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Wanted to draw a piece based on the Chinese story about the emperor who cut the sleeve of his robe instead of rousing his lover who had fallen asleep on it ^^ Def something Hua Cheng would do <3

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Them ❤️

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the first snow. as a family... 🥺

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i reach my hand out to the scorching sun