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Weekly Art Practice - Week 29

· 3 min read
Kylie
Kylie
Admin

An anatomy week with an extra complication, horses. My goal for the week wasn’t to learn to draw horses, a famously difficult creature to master. But more to focus on the shape human bodies take while riding.

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination​

Day 2 - Figure sketching​

I wanted to spend at least some time studying side saddle riding, even though I don’t think it’s going to come up as often as… non side saddle? Middle saddle?

Quick hand sketches using references

Day 3 - Reference studies​

Did a first pass traced in red to try to understand the shapes going on. Bodies are often very hunched so it’s hard to place limbs properly. And because the legs are curved outwards they also lose some length, making for some not perfect looking proportions.

Day 4 - Style studies​

These aren’t super stylized but I wanted to do some artistic references to see if they felt any different. The main thing is that the horse feels like the wild card in artistic interpretations. Some people make the horse extra big to look more powerful while others keep them smaller to make them look more friendly.

Reference: I found this from Sky Rye Design blog post on horse drawing.. But they took this piece from a TooDrawToThink Tumblr post.

Reference: Absolutely can't find a source on this one which is ridiculous. The reverse image search brings up links to music albums which makes no sense. This is it's only pin.

Reference: Can’t find a proper source for this one either, just the Pinterest pin.. But there's also a Reddit thread referencing it, but also with no original source that I could spot. Begging artist to tag/sign their stuff so I can find you T_T

Day 5 - Drawing from imagination​

There was definitely more variety to poses than I was expecting, which made going into day 5 feel intimidating. I ended up just trying to focus on simple poses as I felt like the hunched riding pose was decently difficult on it’s own.

Conclusion​

I would like to do a horse focused week before the end of the year, feels appropriate to tackle the traditional hard subjects.

This coming week is hopefully a return to a nice simple creature week. I’ve found it hard to get into creative projects the last two weeks. When I don’t have a main project on the go, like an Altar Stone background, I often open Procreate, look at not finished pieces, and then just close it. Tried starting a few new things in the last 2 weeks but none of them felt great. Just kind of lost my creative steam.

Pinterest board of horseback riding.