This Is Why It Is so Difficult to Draw a Horse.
The New Yorker comic “How to Draw a Horse” is n’t really practical; this is a story about young love and the beauty of nature, as well as about the embodiment of your feelings in art. But there are also actual tips for drawing horses! So if you’re an artist struggling with anatomy, movement, or proportion, check it out.
How to Draw a Horse, written and drawn by Emma Hansinger, explains why horses are so difficult to draw: they are “so unique and unexpectedly built” that you cannot copy what you have learned from animals like dogs, cats and sheep. Each part of the horse works differently: Hunzinger leads readers from “a thin head that looks different from all angles” to “complex butt”.
But the most important part is the legs. “Their legs are thinner and longer than you would expect,” says Hunsinger. “Their torso looks huge compared to those legs.” It is these slender legs that bend in three places, as the Hunzinger diagram shows, that make horses such great runners.
So make your legs thin, pay attention to where they bend, and see how they work when the horse is walking, trotting or running. Fortunately, there are many reference photos and animations of horse movement; one of the first silent films was made from 24 photographs of a running horse . And Hansinger draws his own pattern showing how a horse walks – each left leg, then each right leg, vs. how he runs – each hind leg, then each front leg.
The comic is not a one-panel cartoon from New York, although Lifehacker has a video tutorial on how to draw like a cartoonist from New York . It’s part of the New Yorker’s Screaming and Mumbling online section , and while it has a sense of humor, it’s not really humorous stuff. You can see more of her work on her Shouts & Murmurs feed and on her Instagram .