Carousel horses, the stuff of childhood memories

 

There you go, as promised from my last post, a drawing of a carousel horse. I'm quite pleased with this one, considering I went into it without expectations of how well it would turn out.

This is adapted from a photo I found online. I kept the colors pretty close to what is online, but made some variations here and there - some variations are the result of my not observing the photo closely enough when sketching it, haha.

Now I know what those online tutorials mean when they say you can pretty much draw anything. It's not so much in the drawing itself, but in how you see what's there in order to render it in color pencils. I had pretty much gone in and winged it, by focusing on what I was seeing - from where the light hits, calling for a bright white, to the shades of yellow on the body that a casual observer may not notice in the photo.

For the most part, I worked off a very basic pencil 2B sketch of the outline of the horse and the places where there is a clear change of color to signify the curvature of muscle. The rest of the details were done in color pencil (my Prismacolor set of 150).

I picked a 10% and 20% French grey for the base color of the body, and worked in the shades with 70% and 90% French grey, jasmine yellow, black, white, a little sienna brown and my trusty white gel pen. (The yellow was particularly useful for rendering a warmth to the warm grey of the body.)

The mane and tail: I sharpened my pencils and added some streaks through the base color, using a mix of the above colors to achieve depth and texture. (No faster way to learn the importance of keeping your pencils sharp for this.)

The saddle was done first. The reds and blues were layered with other colors for depth, to create shadow and highlights.

Looking back on this, I would say right off that the legs were the biggest challenge. It's a horse in gallop, so it was a bit of a struggle to get the legs positioned just right, and then to use color to show
where muscles rippled or where the bones and ligaments showed through the skin. The front right leg still doesn't look right, haha.

The drawing has attracted a dozen "likes" (and counting) on my Instagram account - not bad, considering I don't have that many followers!