Step-By-Step

The foal I am drawing here is named Whiskers. I drew his portrait for a friend, who gave it to her sister for her birthday.  To draw any portrait, I begin by doing a very basic sketch on lined paper.

After the first sketch, I retrace the old lines onto a new lined piece of paper, thinning out the joints and paying more attention to detail and fixing things that are either structurally incorrect or simply do not make the picture look like the real horse.

After the basics are laid out, I move on to the third, and usually final sketch. In this one I fix any more errors, add more personality to the horse, add a basic background, and shade. I shade so I can get a better feel of shadows and shapes of the horse for when I paint. It gives me a feel for what the painting will be like. This picture was set inside a stall, so I drew the stall; however, as you may notice, I ended up dropping it later.

Because I was having problems getting the rear leg correct, I decided to experiment on the computer. I scanned in the image and, using the mouse, reconstructed the leg. I then resized the drawing to 8x10 and printed it off. I traced the drawing onto the canvas paper, thinning out the back leg and defining it better.

This is the final project! Whew! As you can see, I dropped the stall. The photogragh was taken with a flash in a dark stall, so the shadows were everywhere, and not too attractive. As you can see, I kept the shadow over his stomach, whereas I had drawn it in other pictures. The shadow joined the black background and put more focus on Whiskers.

Because I was happy with the results, I rescanned the final project and converted it to black and white. Then I added a brown tint and text, and it became my webpage logo!