BEHIND-THE-SCENES: Horseback riding - from gesture to final sketch (Patreon)

While creating concepts for Skybound, it finally hit me on the head how important horses were to Central Asian (and various nomadic) societies. So I felt the need to include a horse companion in my game. But it was intimidating because I’ve never drawn a horse before!

1) Where to start? I like acting out a lot of the actions beforehand, to get a better understanding of the physics/range of motion. But I didn’t have access to a horse IRL *cry face*. Instead, I started with the next best thing--documentaries on Kazahk eagle hunters to get a better understanding on how one would ride a horse and also how one would handle an eagle while riding (though in the end this didn't really factor into the sketch... but one day maybe). Here’s a neat video that I referenced: https://youtu.be/_48K5I5XleQ

There’s also a lot of great photos online of general horseback riding, so I used those to supplement my visual knowledge. And finally, the last important reference category is horse anatomy--I pulled a few basic diagrams of horse skeletal/muscular structures. You can only learn so much from looking at surfaces.

2) First, a gesture: obviously I'm not worrying too much about anatomy at this point, just trying to see if anything works. Ugh sorry this is so messy!! I was in a hurry (ok not an excuse), but in the future, I’d like my gestures to be cleaner and more accurate. Ultimately this just means that I’ll need to be better about doing my gesture exercises!

3) Next, based on my research, I blocked out the horse--in the drawing, it’s actually a different breed than the stouter-looking Steppe ones. They were cute, but I wanted something a bit more gracile. Horse heads are surprisingly large? They have such strange faces!!! Overall, getting proportions correct were really important, because with familiar stuff like horses, if you get one thing off, it’ll end up looking like a weird cow or camel or whatever :DDD Also blocked out my human figure… for this I sanity checked with my video refs and also a posable doll that I have around at my desk.

4) Cleanup: I like to draw faces first, but doing so almost in conjunction with the character's clothing to see if everything still looks right. The second image below is another layer that I can turn off and on. I also drew in the eagle (needed to grab some more videos of eagles in flight to get a better understanding of how their wings worked).

5) Details: once that looks about right, I’ll start laying the details on top of everything. I love detail work, but I really have to stop myself from jumping into it too quickly, because any drawing is only going to be as good as the structural stuff beneath. Always a challenge for my detail-oriented brain!

6) Finally, added some shadows to make things pop. In the future, I’ll probably try to figure out some way to keep more of the energy in this drawing, whether that be a more dynamic gesture, or not detailing/cleaning up stuff too much. I’m sure I’ll start nitpicking it a few months from now… I’m sure there’s a ton of mistakes with my horse AND figure, but for now it’s time to move on.

7) And here’s a final close up!