Advent calendar - December 11.

I previously asked you guys what you wanted me to do a tutorial of, and many of you agreed that you wanted a hoof shading tutorial! 

To be honest I feel a bit bad doing it, cause I have a very simple way of drawing hooves, but maybe you'll come across a few tips and tricks anyways, and I'm here to please ❤ so here we go! 

Step one: unless you use sso hooves as base, you should start off with a base color, which should be a medium dark color. This tutorial can easily be used on sso bases too!

Step two: Shade with a darker color on the natural places, like underneath the coronet band, on the bottom (sole?) and on the back of the hoof. I use a standard round brush on 50% opacity and slowly build up the shadow, but use the shading brush you prefer!

Step three: repeat step two, but with a lighter color! Focus on the center area and in the front. Both shading and highlighting is a build up process. Repeat and repeat again until you're satisfied with the intensity of the shadows and highlights. 

Step four: this is where the magic happens, and this is a neat trick to create a somewhat realistic texture on the hoof. My secret is that I use a hair brush to create the textures (brush is provided). I use the brush with a darker color than the shadows, on 80% opacity with both pressure for size and pressure for opacity setting on. And then I just simply drag the brush down the hoof and vary the pressure on my hand to create various sizes on the strokes

Step five: repeat step four only with highlights. Here I focus on the front of the hoof, and some highlights in-between the darker strokes.

And that's pretty much it! To finish it off I always go over with a dodge and burning tool, and play around with details and sharpness settings to make the details, highlights etc pop!

I hope you found this somewhat useful!

Hugs from Cath ❤