Drawing a Horse with a Grid

In a previous post, I showed you how to draw a digital grid on a reference photo. The photo was a horse, and today, I’d like to show you one way of drawing a horse with a grid.

This is a continuation of the project I used for the first post, and is the second installment in what will be a lengthy tutorial over the next several weeks. I will provide links to each of the previous posts every time I publish a new post in the series.

Now let’s get to the step-by-step!

Drawing a Horse with a Grid

This is my reference photo, complete with the digital grid I made in the previous post.

I printed the grid without the image and used that for the initial drawing steps. The paper is ordinary printer paper, and I used an inexpensive mechanical pencil for drawing. Mechanical pencils are great for this type of work because they never need sharpening and you can get refill leads in a variety of hardnesses. My mechanical pencil is either a .07mm, or a .05mm. I don’t know because the numbers are worn off!

With the reference photo open on my computer and the blank grid in front of me, it’s time to start drawing.

Step 1

I begin by roughing in the main shapes. That includes the general outline of the horse, the placement of the eye, mouth, ears and nostrils. In this case, it also included the halter.

The eye is where I usually start, because that’s often the most important part of a portrait. It’s important to get the placement correct, and the size and shape right.

I also draw some of the major shapes, especially around the eye and muzzle, but it’s easy to see that I’m not yet focused on details.

In general, I work from square to square, figuring out the outline of the head and neck. I use light pressure for this. Graphite is very easy to erase, but I also work over the initial lines as I continue drawing. I don’t do much erasing until later in the drawing process.

Step 2

Once the basic shapes are in place and I like the position of the head and neck relative to one another, then I go over the drawing again. I’m still using the mechanical pencil, but I darken the lines as well as refine them.

This step begins with the eye, too. Then I work outward in all directions from there. I’m still working from one square to another, but now I also tend to wander around the drawing. I also look for major inaccuracies and fix them first. Sometimes fixing a big problem automatically eliminates smaller problems in the same area.

But that’s not always true, so I continue refining the drawing, working from the big problems to constantly smaller problems.

Step 3

As you can see, I started erasing in this step. I had to erase parts of the eye to get it more accurate. The erasure left some smudges, but because I’m working on printer paper at this stage, that didn’t matter.

I also worked around the muzzle and mouth, the ears (especially the right ear), and the side of the face next to the background.

The halter also needed a significant amount of work. I enjoy drawing halters and bridles, but they can be a challenge. Much of this halter is in shadow or half light, which made seeing details a bit difficult. So although it looks much better at the end of this step than at the beginning, there are still some problem areas.

But I also sketched in the shape of the mane and worked around the mouth and eye.

It can be helpful to work on adjacent areas together at this stage. A lot of this work is drawing, erasing, and redrawing. If I find that fixing the shape or position of the eye affects the way the halter looks, then it’s helpful to fix that, too.

Step 4

This step begins by scanning the line drawing and overlaying it on the gridded reference photo in Affinity Publisher. I make the line drawing about 50% transparent so I can see the reference photo through it.

I line up the two images at a key location, usually the eye, then resize the transparent layer until it matches the size of the photo beneath as closely as possible.

You can see in this illustration that the eye, the near ear, parts of the halter and the lower edge of the neck are all pretty accurate.

But if you look closely, the top edge of the neck, the right ear, and the lower part of the head are a little bit off. So are parts of the halter.

That’s the purpose of this overlay: Showing me areas that are not correctly drawn. With this image open on the computer, I work on the line drawing and correct those inaccuracies.

Step 5

This time, I used a red Verithin pencil. This allowed me to see the corrections clearly as I made them. It also eliminated the need to erase anything, and those wrongly drawn lines gave me additional guidance in making corrections.

When I finished making corrections, I scanned the drawing again for my records.

Step 6

The last step in the process is transferring the line drawing to a fresh piece of paper. Once again, I used ordinary printer paper for the new drawing. I taped the two pieces of paper together, with the line drawing under the fresh paper. Then I used a window as a light box and carefully traced the drawing onto the new sheet of paper.

At this point, I have a line drawing ready to send to the client for approval. I scanned it at 300 dpi (I scan all my images at 300 dpi), saved it at 3000 pixels wide, and had a digital copy that was small enough to email to the client, but large enough for the client to see the details.

Drawing a Horse using a Grid

The entire process start to finish took a little over three hours spread over two days. There were a couple of review days mixed in, so I was either working on the line drawing or reviewing it for parts of four days.

Drawing a horse using a grid doesn’t have to be complex or take a lot of time. Of course, the size and complexity of the horse you want to draw makes a difference. I was drawing only a head and neck.

But the same principle applies to drawing a full figure of a horse or drawing multiple horses. It even works if you want to draw horses in a landscape.

Previous Posts in This Series

Drawing a Digital Grid on a Reference Photo

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