Digital Drawing – How to Draw a Horse | EDESIGNERZ.NET

Digital Drawing – How to Draw a Horse

This tutorial will show you techniques of creating a digital drawing by means of Photoshop. Step 1 There are many artists who create astonishing images with a mouse alone. But if you’re going to become a digital artist, it will be a great help if you purchase digital art tablet. I use Aiptek 8000U Pro. I start [...]

Digital Horse

This tutorial will show you techniques of creating a digital drawing by means of Photoshop.

Step 1

There are many artists who create astonishing images with a mouse alone. But if you’re going to become a digital artist, it will be a great help if you purchase digital art tablet. I use Aiptek 8000U Pro.

I start with a blank white image in Photoshop. It’s quite hard to draw without idea and inspiration, but at this moment I have an image of what I want in my mind. It will be a scene of parting with homeland. I do not know why the main character had to leave, but he can never return and feels very sad about it.

From this moment I am working only with hard round brush, the only exception will be for the atmosphere effects. I create a rough sketch in Photoshop to define basic shapes and composition. Some people prefer to make this on paper and then scan it to Photoshop. Yeah, you’re right, the main character is a horse

Divide the canvas area into thirds horizontally and vertically when building composition to see where the lines cross. It’s the focal point of your picture and the best spot in which to place the center of attention of your picture. I want to show the interaction between the stallion and the land left behind, so my focal point is between the horse eye and the sun. Wind and sunset will add dramatic effect.

Step 2

Defining more exact contours of the horse head and erasing helping lines. It’s very important to use references, especially when the object is not very well-known to you. I’ve found a beautiful photo of white arabian stallion at Equestrian.ru, that I will use as a reference.

Step 3

Adding depth and atmospheric perspective. Objects on the foreground will be dark and farther ones will be lighter. At this step I create three separete layers: for horse, mountains and sky.

Step 4

I begin to paint shadows with black hard round brush (opacity 30%) on a new layer above the sketch. The direction of light is determined by the position of sun. See how the depth of shadows changes when you make several strokes at the same place.

Step 5

The same thing for the lights, just change the color to white. The most relief parts will have the richest lighting and the darkest shadows. It will be easier to divide the object into elemental shapes (sphere for the base of the head and for the belly, cylinder for the neck etc.) and to paint lights and shadows on each of them. Also you can try to study some references with the proper lighting.

Step 6

Adding standard black and white radial gradient for the sky…

Step 7

…and white to transparent for the sun. Also I deleted the layer with sketch and painted thin light reflections with grey brush on the edges of mountains.

Step 8

I made the transitions between shadows and lights a little softer. Still hard round brush, but with varying opacity (from 15 to 50%) and color. I use different shades of gray that I get from mixing the base colors by semi-transparent brush and picking new shades with Eyedropper tool. I do not want to create a realistic picture but to leave a proper drawing style, so the strokes are still quite harsh. Smudge tool with any spatter brush will help you if you need to create smooth transitions.

Step 9

The same thing for mane and tail. I create single hairs with small diameter non-transparent brush. The tail will have lights only on its contours because the sun is right behind it. Then I merged the layers with base, shadows and lights of the horse.

Step 10

Ctrl+U to add color. I have a sunset here, so the colors will be brownish orange. I add color with the same parameters to all layers.

Step 11

On a new layer I create some clouds with 30% opacity white spatter brush.

Step 12

At this step I added 10 px blur (Filter – Blur – Gaussian Blur) to the clouds and colorized the sky with radial gradient from transparent to #78220A.

Step 13

Now there’s a new layer with 10% opacity behind the horse, where I painted a wavy white field for the fog.

Step 14

Applying wave effect to the fog (Filter – Distort – Wave).

Step 15

At this step I duplicate the fog layer several times and pressing Ctrl+F for each layer to repeat Wave filter.

Step 16

I am merging all fog layers and adding blur (Filter – Blur – Gaussian Blur) to remove hard edges.

Step 17

I want to make that horse coming out of fog, so I take soft round eraser with opacity about 10-20% and make some careful strokes on the tail, so it looks like covered with fog.

Step 18

I decided to repaint mountains with green. Still hard round brush and nothing else. Note that I use separate layers for the base color, shadows and highlight, so I can change the opacity of each layer to achieve the best effect.

Step 19

Remember, that the shadows cannot be pure black or the image will look dull and plain. So I am changing the black shadows on my horse to green. The best option for this is Image – Adjustments – Replace Color. Select the darkest area area of horse with eyedropper that will appear when Replace Color window opens, set little amount of Fuzziness and adjust Saturation and Hue until you like the color of shadows.

Step 20

Continue working with mountains. I reduced their contrast (Image – Adjustments – Brightness/Contrast) as they were too sharp and distracted the attention from the main figure of the picture, blended the shadows and highlights with Smudge tool (spatter brush) and darkened the most shadowed areas with Burn tool. Finally, I used Replace color for the light areas and added some red tint by changing Hue.

Step 21

This is the last step. I added red reflections from the sky to mountains and horse by painting them with transparent round orange brush. Reflections bring some kind of unity to the objects on the image. The brighter and the closer one object to another, the more it will affect its color.