Drawing a brown hairy pony :)

This is the first drawing I uploaded to my website.

As you can see, I’ve drawn a brown-haired pony with too much hair. It falls all over his head and blocks his view.

I searched the Internet for inspiration and found a picture of a snow white horse. Hair blown aside by the wind. A broad coat with brown, white, and yellow manes. The image struck me because of the beautiful composition and the great positioning of the manes. So I decided to try to make a composition like this picture.

I started by sketching the rough outline of the horse. After I was satisfied with the composition, I started coloring the horse with all the brown colors I could find. You might ask: why not white, like the example picture? This is because I did not really want to make a white horse. It had been a while since I had drawn one, and white is a difficult color to draw. There are several shades of brown, whereas there is only one shade of white. I also wanted to create a colourful image and a white horse would probably have resulted in a less colorful drawing.

I used brown after brown after brown to create shadows and texture in the horse’s coat. Then I coloured the eyes, which was not really colouring because I made them black, which is not really a colour. Then I coloured the manes, which I had not paid much attention to until then. I had a (very) rough outline of where I wanted them to be.

Together with the shrinking of my coloured pencils, my horse began to take shape and grow in character. Eventually I decided to put my pencils aside for a second and just look at my drawing so far. Then I noticed so many things that were not quite right, where not quite what I had intended. The hair looked ridiculous, as if the pony had just had a haircut and was ready for a party. The eye was not tilted as much as it should have been. Lots of things I could do better next time.

With this information, I tried to finish my drawing as best I could. I added some shadows here, a little more contrast there. I tilted the eye a little more, but I could not quite fix the trendy hairstyle of this pony. Actually, I think the hairstyle turned out quite well in the end. It does not look very natural for a horse, but it makes the drawing fun to look at. Combining an animal and a human hairstyle.

There is always room for improvement and this is definitely not the best horse I have ever drawn. But I had fun drawing this horse. And I learned that you can use an example picture and end up with a completely different horse. And that’s what counts!