Horse Anatomy I

From birds to horses! Many of my readers have asked about painting horses. When Jack started teaching me to work with oils the first thing he said was, “Paint what you know.” I loved and had grown up with horses, it was only natural I paint these beautiful animals. I knew all the parts of the horse by heart.

In painting and sculpting proportions are essential in capturing the essence of a horse. Someone may not know much about them but they know if your horse looks right or not. Using the length of the horse’s head is a true way to get the proportions of the horse on your canvas or armature correct. The drawing above shows how the length of the animal’s head relates to the different points on his body.  The smaller drawing illustrates how the head is divided into 4 quarters, based on the shape of the skull.

Since many artists combine people with horses the chart above gives the relative proportions of the two.

As Jack and I traveled the United States visiting various horse breeders we found ourselves stopping at the Kentucky Horse Park time and time again. The people are wonderful and the facilities incredible. This series of drawings is used for teaching purposes in their Equine Management Program. I will show more in tomorrow’s post. Please feel free to print any of these out, I’ve published them for you to use as reference. Have a wonderful day. Hugs, Mikki Senkarik

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