Drawing a white cantering horse – Day 7

This drawing is part of my 30-days drawing challenge, in which I’ll try to make a new drawing/painting daily.

Today I looked through my pile of horse posters (which is an incredible source of inspiration), planning to draw a Fjord horse today. However, when I came across a poster of a beautiful white cantering horse I changed my mind, and decided to draw this horse instead. The Fjord will have to wait for another day.

I started by sketching the rough outlines of the body. Starting with the very core of the drawing: circles, to indicate where all the head, main body and legs where supposed to be. After that I connected all those circles and added details such as manes, eyes, mouth and nose, tail. My final sketch can be seen below.

When my sketch was finished I started with coloring the horse with watercolor. The horse on the example was white colored and I doubted about whether I would keep it white or make it just brown, because I wasn’t certain whether a white horse would look beautiful on a white page. However, in the end I decided upon using white, and started with color the entire horse in one layer of white, before moving on the details adding yellow, grey, pink and black.

Afterwards I started on the real details and shadows, adding various shades of gray to the drawing to create a vivid image of a cantering horse. I finished my drawing by adding yellow/brown to the hooves and creating a brown spot where sand was being thrown upwards by the hooves, all adding the impression of a horse in a full canter.

I am very satisfied with the result, because you clearly see the motion of the horse in the this image, which was exactly as I wanted.