How to draw a horse

Can you draw a horse by following a certain set of steps? We’re about to find out!

Step 1

Draw a small circle and make sure to place it in the upper left part of your canvas. This will be our horse’s head, although it doesn’t look like much now.

Step 2

Add a flowerpot-shaped object to the lower left part of the “head”. Try placing it just like we did in our step-by-step drawing.

Step 3

Now let’s give our horse a neck. Draw a rounded shape and attach it to the upper and lower part of the circle. Pay attention to how smooth the shape is and how it widens as it goes down.

Step 4

Now we’re getting to the fun part, the body. Draw two circles and place them in the same horizontal plane. Make the first circle bigger and the second one smaller. Pay attention to where their centre is – it’s not on the same plane! The smaller circle attaches to the bigger circle, but their imaginary centres don’t line up.

Step 5

Now we’ll add the leg shapes. Front legs are like long cylinders that narrow slightly as they go down before widening slightly again right at the bottom, at the hooves. The hind legs have an extra bend where the thigh and the shin meet. The bend is much more pronounced in the hind leg in the background, farthest from us.

Step 6

Wow look at us go!

In this step, we’ll add an eye contour (place the eye very close to the line inside the circle, the one that represents the top of the “flowerpot”) and ear contours as well (by attaching two triangles at the top of the head). Finally, we’ll add the nostrils and the mouth.

Step 7

Now erase the extra lines from the previous steps to “clean” the drawing.

Step 8

It would be a pretty strange horse without a tail and mane, wouldn’t it? On the forehead, the mane looks like a fringe, while on the back it resembles long hair. The key rule here is to always draw the hairs in the mane or tail in the same direction as they grow, from roots to ends.

Step 9

Now let’s add some light shading. Don’t forget about a big shadow on the inside of the back hind leg. We also need to add a shadow on the ground below the horse to prevent it from looking like it’s levitating.

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