Horse shading tutorial/guide

Hello fam! How are you all doing? 👋🤎

In today's post will I be sharing a speed drawing video that I made into a tutorial/guide about shading horses.

In the video can you both read and see the process, but here comes a bit of a summary:

▪ I use a soft round brush on pen pressure, but also change the flow to around 20-30%.

▪ I start of a bit messy with tracing and shading of the line art.

▪ I always work/shade in sections.

▪ I change the size of the brush a lot during my shading.

▪ I only use the smudge tool for certain details, not for the whole shading. So i mainly just use the paint brush.

▪ I go over the same area many times.

▪ I go in with a smaller size of the brush when i've done the majority of shading for my section to bring out some details, both for the shadows and highlights.

Trust the process.
Because the thing is that much of my shading is just coming from the feeling I get while working, how whimsical it might sounds like. It is not much of a super complicated process i'm going after, i just let my hand and muscle memory do the work. It does sound so repetitive i know, but the more you do it, the better you will get. Your hand and muscles will learn with time.

It is also easier said than done, but do not have too high expectation. A big part of my way of working is "does this look like good shading for a leg? Yes it looks like a leg, good enough". It doesn't have to be perfect or make 100% sense anatomically all of the time. It is just art after all.

If you now feel like: "But Lucia, I'm new to shading, this all feels like such a big step"
Start small and don't aim to shade particular details from the horse. Pick out the larger muscle parts of a horse. You don't have to include all of the tendons, joints and muscles, it is ok. It is better to focus on some parts and get comfortable with those than to go all in directly to shade everything from the horse. Then you eventually can take the next step and maybe shade more details.

I hope this all was to any help. Remember you can always drop if you've any questions in the comments or over on discord.

Hugs-