Special Effects: How to Create Tricky Aspects of Horse Color for Beginners Part IV

Introduction to Part IV

We’re back at it with this six-part series delving into some painting techniques for beginners, this being Part IV. We’ve covered a lot of ground in Part I, II, and III, from painting eyes and hoof striping to mapping and dun factors, but we have a ways to go still. There’s lots more ground to cover.

But that’s the great thing about learning—there’s always something new to glean and ponder, isn’t there? It just never ends. Well, the same is so for our art—there will always be that new interpretation to express, that subtle nuance to reproduce, that novel feature to capture. It’s just an unending source of inspiration and fascination that fuels our efforts! Truly, this marvelous creature we so love presents us with enough material for several lifetimes, and still there would be more! That in mind then, let’s continue our explorations with more tricky features to paint so let’s jump right in!…

Painting Faces

Every horse’s face is unique, just like ours. And each one is absolutely beautiful, isn’t it? And if you look closely, you’ll tease out lots of little highlighted and shaded details we can transfer to our paintjob as well. Indeed, the horse's face is full of neato details and tonal changes and it's fun to capture all that in our paintjob. Plus it really helps to bring the sculpture to life and adds so much interest to our portfolio. So take some time to observe and study the horse’s face up close. Because, yeah, pop those details onto your painted face and…bam…your paintwork is immediately launched to the next level! But how do we do that?

Well, look at your references and note where the highlights are hitting and where the shadows are falling on the head. Squint your eyes if necessary as that helps to generalize things better. Now note which of those areas are skeletal such as the zygomatic arches, the nasal bone, jaw bars, and the teardrop bone. These areas do best when they appear hard and solid, not fleshy and squishy and a handy way to achieve this is using bold blocks of highlight and shadow. (However, don't forget that certain coat colors often call for bony areas to be darkly shaded. For example, on many greys and sooties, the teardrop bone and zygomatics can be dark at times.) Now identify the fleshy parts such as the jowls, the buccinator bellies, the muzzle, the eyelids, eyebrow wrinkles, forehead musculature, and fleshy details and textures. These are gooshy areas that do best when painted in a way that amplifies that quality. A handy way to mimic this is to use a bold shading treatment with embedded tonal differences, with a squiggly, multi-layered treatment to highlighting, textural details, and tone. Indeed, squiggles of light color are particularly helpful in the expanse between the eye and nostril, for instance. Now identify those details that should be specially painted such as veins, wrinkles, eyelashes, ear fuzz, ripples, moles, subtle bumps or depressions, or other little touches. Like with fleshy parts, these squooshy or textural details should appear gooshy and soft or fuzzy, not hard and firm. A good way to achieve this is a subtle layering of color and tone to make them sit back in some places and pop out in others. Then lastly, pay careful attention to hair growth patterns such as forehead whorls, or the flow or grouping of fleabites, or the grain on composite colors (like roan and grey). Likewise, hair details on the face should appear fuzzy or silky, and a diffused use of paint with subtle, strategic, striated detail can do much to mimic this effect. For example, drawing in “hairs” with sharp color pencils and then softening them with a burnisher or airbrush to make them “sit back" into the coat can work well. Just stay mindful of scale when painting in little hairs. Also be mindful of the color and tones of the details you're painting, paying close attention to your references. For instance, on some coats, the moles can be dark dots rather than highlighted nodules.

Here are some tips for painting faces before you start: 

• A handy way to visualize things is to think of the face being lit from a single light source, somewhere in the front, about five inches from the sculpture’s nasal bone and forehead. This helps to mimic the angle of the sun's light in a flattering way. So where the light hits is where the highlight should be concentrated and where it doesn’t should be where shade is applied. In other words, the “tops” of things need highlight and the “bottoms” of things need shading. 
• Determine what the hair situation is or grooming status the sculpture represents before shading the face. For instance, a horse with a tightly clipped face, such as a show Arabian, will have more dark skin showing and influencing the body color, so pay attention to where and how that manifests. In contrast, a fuzzy, winter-coated horse will sometimes have less dark skin showing.
• It can be a good idea to tint dark skin greys away from stark black and white mixtures away from stark white to instead infuse some tans and browns to soften them for a muted or fleshier look. Also, this gives you a "place to go" when you add highlights and shadings. And don’t always think in terms of body color and and black for skin aspects. In reference photos, look for greys, tans, greens (grass staining) and other colors that can add realism and dimension to the skin areas. Also look for highlighted areas such as the nostril rims, muzzle wrinkling, and fleshy bits that do well with a bit of accentuation with soft, lighter highlights. However, when it comes to certain dilutes like champagne, pearl, isabella, etc., think in terms of their respective "lavender" brown, brownish, or pink skin tones instead of charcoal skin.
• Work to make the intensity of the facial shading consistent to the intensity of the body shading since both need to harmonize. A body given cursory treatment looks odd with a face that’s been super detailed or visa versa. Keep the big picture in mind.
• These techniques are easily scaled up or down with how big your sculpture or medallion is. Just be sure that as the size diminishes that precision and scale become more of an issue.
• Something to consider is that not all things in nature translate well into painted sculpture. For instance, a coat color may come right up to the eyes, muzzle, and inside clipped ears of a real horse, but this effect isn’t so flattering on a painted sculpture because it looks unfinished. Champagnes and similar dilutes can be particularly challenging for this reason. Really, just a bit of darker shading in these areas can do a world of good for a painted sculpture to read better, but it's up to you and your references.
• Accentuate the sculpted expression in pigment, don't work against it. Likewise, we should let the sculpture guide our creative choices...follow it, don't fight it.
• Pay attention to tonal differences on the face characteristic of a coat pattern or characteristic for an authentic result such as sooty, dun factors, or pangaré.
• Horse faces can be tricky to paint as they characterized by both hard and soft structures that have to read right. To that end, straight lines tend to look hard and squiggly lines tend to look fleshy. Manipulate these effects to mimic bone or flesh on the head.
• We can use fine liner brushes, pencil pastels, or color pencils to further detail markings, eyes, or other facial features. Just try to blend or mute the color pencils since stark pencil work can be distracting when set against more blended, subtle media. Always harmonize the media so it all marries together.
• Pay attention to details and how they could be painted. For instance, again sometimes moles around the eye and on the muzzle will show up as a dark spot rather than a neutral one or a lighter one, depending on the color and coat situation.
• Be sure to paint in the eyelashes if they're present, and add delicate striations to really drive the point home if you wish, like how you would paint fuzzy ears (discussed in a bit).
• Don’t be too timid with shade and highlight. We have to recreate the look of mass and anatomy, remember. And in the sea of sculptures with flat facial shading, anything with the lifelike pizzazz will get the attention. However, that said, don't go overboard either so the piece looks like carnival paint. It’s a delicate balance.
• A fuzzy coat can warrant highlighting and shading of the hair clumps and striations, so pay attention to hair texture on the head.
• Keep things diffused so they aren't harsh, literal lines. This will help the look of living flesh more than a painted model.
• Not every facial structure needs to be emphasized equally or "outlined" with shadow all the time. Sometimes some sculptures do better with hinting at things instead so we should use our discretion for what works best for the sculpture. Always work in the sculpture's best interest.
• Dark parts tend to look smaller than light parts, so if a facial aspect (such as a nostril) is awkwardly large, simply keep it darker toned. Or, on the other hand, if an area is too small, use white markings or starker highlight to make them appear larger.
• Don't forget to shade and highlight large patches of white, too, like a large marking on the face. Having an intricately shaded color portion with a big plain white marking isn’t as cohesive as giving them similar treatment. This is especially so of bald faces where all you really have is a white face you have to make work in a lifelike bony and fleshy way.
• Don’t ignore the ears! Look for wrinkles, veining, hair growth patterns, and other details you can recreate. It doesn't necessarily have to be on the sculpture itself for you to duplicate it in pigment either, you can paint it on.
• A face looks best if the ears, eyes, and nostrils have the same level of interest value, the same degree of treatment, so be sure to harmonize all three.
• All details don’t need the same intensity of pigment. Indeed, a life-like quality can be best served with differing intensities in strategic locations. For example, perhaps the “Y” vein on the face looks best with a brighter highlight while any veining on the jowl or ears will do better with subtler highlighting. Or maybe that "Y" vein needs varying tones to highlight it for a fleshier appearance rather than just using one highlight color. Similarly, while the eyebrow wrinkles can look good with a bolder treatment of highlight and shade, the muzzle wrinkles are more convincing with a softer touch. So pay attention to how highlight and shadow play on the face differently for a living effect.
• Study the work of other artists to discover how they tackled certain aspects. Studying how they met the challenge can go far to refine our own Eye and rethink our ideas. 
• We should gather lots of good reference photos and consider how we would paint them on a static sculpture. Ponder where highlight and shade occur plus the look of details, squiggles, ridges, ripples, striations, and other little features. Compare and contrast, and pay attention to breed, age, seasonal, and individual variations. This helps us to develop a fuller mental library and the freedom to express the face with broader ideas than what’s habitual.
• Because each face is individualistic, so should your facial paint job. So approach each painted face with a new, fresh idea. Avoid habit, formula, and try to ignore what's expected by convention. So study to find what lies beyond that proverbial box and seek to infuse novelty into each of your painted faces. 
• The more faces you paint, the more confident you’ll become so just keep at it. It’ll get easier!

So to start painting all this, try this process on a dark-skinned head (you can do the same with a pink-skinned marked head, just use dark pinks for the shade tones instead):

• Basecoat the entire head the same color as the body or how your reference photo indicates.
• Block in any tonal differences indicative of a pattern such as pangaré, sooty, dun factoring, or grey.
• Block in the charcoal shadings of the eye, nostril, and ear.
• Line the top ridges of the eyelids and brow wrinkles in a light grey or light version of the body color, and the crevices of the wrinkles in dark charcoal or a dark version of the body color. Also use the dark charcoal color to add that "eyeliner" around the lower eye rim and to define the front corner of the eye. Go back and fix any oopsies with the appropriate color to tidy things up so they're precise.
• Use black or dark charcoal to color in the nostril (inside the "V" where the two rims meet, too) and line of the mouth. Then line the rims of the nostrils and muzzle wrinkles in a light grey or light body color, whichever works best for the overall effect.
• Lay in the facial shadings, underneath the skeletal and fleshy structures plus the “salt cellar," or the hollow within the zygomatic arches as well. The shade color should be most intense in the remotest areas, but diffuse into the basecoat. Examples of what to potentially shade: Underneath the zygomatic arches, the jawline, above and underneath the teardrop bone to make it "pop," under the buccinator bellies, down the middle of the nasal bone and some of the soft fleshy details from eye to muzzle. We can also shade the space between the jaw bars under the head. Overall though, choose to shade where it's strategic for the sculpture, flattering it best and being most accurate to its facial structure.
• Lay in the highlights. Think of concentrated streaks of highlight placed in very specific places and forms. Keep the pigment bright and clean. Examples of what to highlight: Each ridge of the nasal bone, the tops of the zygomatic arches, the ridge of the teardrop bone, the tops of the buccinator bellies, the jaw bars, and the jowl area beneath the eye and diffusing towards the bottom into the shaded part. Again, keep the sculpting of the sculpture in mind when choosing highlighted areas.
• Squiggle in brighter, tighter, and more concentrated highlight in strategic areas of the fleshy areas to make them appear gooshy such as around the muzzle, under the eye, the expanse between the eye and the muzzle, on the buccinator bellies, and on the jowl. Squiggles help to make these areas appear fleshy with their complex web of underlying flesh and fascia.
• Pay attention to the fleshy muzzle texture between the nostrils, too, when looking at the face from the front, shading and highlighting any crevices, bumps, and contours as needed.
• Use the basecoat color to blend everything, then go back and deepen shading or brighten highlight as needed. Add extra tones and tints as needed, and continue to fudge and detail and then…
• Lay in markings then finish by putting a dab of dark flesh color deep inside the nostrils. Be sure to shade and highlight the markings, too, to avoid a flat paintjob that will seem inconsistent to your detailed face.
• Extra points: After you’re satisfied, highlight veins, nerves, tiny fleshy details, and wrinkles.

There are five things to avoid when painting the face. First, don’t create a confusing mess. Paint like you mean it by keeping the ideas clear and the facial features distinct to push along the sense of clear anatomy. Second, similarly, the face has to make sense visually or it’ll be distracting. Each detail and portion of the face should be treated with a meticulous, precise hand. For instance, an eyelid highlight should be exactly on the tops of the eyelid and not slid into the crease. Likewise, shading should be exactly within the fold and not creep up onto the ridge of the eye lid. Similarly, vein highlights should be exactly on top of the veins and not slip off onto the facial musculature. Precision is everything when painting faces! Third, don’t forget to get fiddly because details count. Remember that we’re dealing with inanimate objects that have to mimic life, and usually an overly simplistic approach to facial shading needs a bit of help to truly convey this impression. We don't want our piece to look just like a hurriedly painted model, do we? So pay extra attention to details, deliberately accentuating them with pigment carefully. Like look for tonal changes, squiggles, ripples, and tiny striations in life and in the sculpture to accentuate to really wake up our facial paintwork. Third, don’t approach everything in the same way. Know which to emphasize and which to give softer treatment. For example, the zygomatic arches and buccinators can do well with a bolder treatment whereas the muzzle can often use a subtler touch. Fourth, don’t ignore the ears. They should given the same special treatment as the rest of the face. This means that their insides should be detailed (which we’ll discuss in a bit) and the colored ear rims should also be neatly done as well as the “V” where the ear folds join the head. And fifth, don’t regard facial shading and highlight as an afterthought. It’s as integral to the paintjob as dapples or markings. Indeed, a skillful coloration of the face can make a sculpture all by itself, so think about going the extra mile. (Recommended Reading: Face Off Again: Painting Equine Faces Redeux)

Highlighting Veins

A nifty detail to include is the subtle highlighting of veins on the face, ears, and body. Do this well, and the impression of a thin skinned horse is really amplified which can be extremely effective for hot bloods like Arabians, Amazigh, Marwaris, Thoroughbreds, and Tekes, or for those pieces depicting athletic motion. Do it not so well, and well…not so good. So the stakes are high! So practice on a junker first to get a feel for this technique before really diving in.

So determine your piece’s primary body colors in the areas with veining. What you want to do is make your highlight color one shade lighter than the primary color so the vein will “pop,” but not too much. You want just a subtle indication, not something that’ll capture the eye and not let go. Now it’s better to work in sections rather than all over, all at once, so do one region of the body at a time. So mix up some paint that’s your highlight color for an area and thin it to 1% milk consistency. You want it to be opaque enough to show up, but not so opaque as to look “painted on.” On the other hand, you don’t want it so diluted as to be too transparent that’ll also be prone to pool, drip, get patchy or streak. There’s a Goldilocks Zone for consistency here, which you’ll learn soon enough through feel. Okay, now take your small round with the longer bristles, like your mapping brush, and dip it in the paint and dab out the excess then trace onto the selected veins with paint, being very careful to keep right on the vein and not flup off onto the body. Absolute precision is critical. However, you don’t have to highlight every vein or capillary as often times simply choosing strategic ones will do. It’s up to you. Also, you can simply paint in little capillaries if you wish. Indeed, sometimes these structures are so small or the scale of the piece is so tiny that they warrant this painted-on approach. Just keep it subtle and not garish. Extra points: Highlight the vascular network on the ear.

You want to avoid five things. First, don’t make your highlight color too bright otherwise it’ll make for a distracting result. You merely want to amplify them just enough to drive the point home, not create an eye-sink. Keep it subtle. Second, don’t create a messy, confused result as this is a distraction. Instead, be precise and steady-handed at all times when highlighting veins. It makes for not only a more tidy result, but ones that makes a lot more sense. And third, it’s often not a good idea to shade under a vein as highlighting is often more than enough to get the point across. In this case, using a feather can be far more effective than using a hammer. Fourth, don’t amplify problematic veining. In other words, don’t bring our attention to something that’s a liability. So only highlight veins if they’re correct and convincing because if they aren’t, highlighting them is only going to become a big distraction. And fifth, don’t paint out of scale. Always keep scale in mind. Really, if you cannot highlight a vein tiny enough, then it’s better not to.

Painting Fuzzy Ears

Fuzzy ears are just charming and endearing, aren’t they? So cute! But painting them can be a little bit of a challenge. Once we’re armed with some ideas though, they can actually be really fun to paint! Truly, to see the ears just “wake up” right before your eyes is so cool! (Recommended reading: All Ears: Sculpting the Equine Ear)

Okay, first off, you need good, reliable, applicable fuzzy ear references. That’s to say that ear fuzz color can be dependent on the body color, so pay attention to any correlations. For instance, ear fuzz on a grulla is often counter-intuitively very pale rather than dark and you need to know that before you paint. So only use references of ear fuzz that are derived from your actual body color. In other words, if you’re painting an apricot dun, only use ear fuzz photos of apricot duns as references. These types of references aren’t interchangeable.

Now another thing to remember about ear fuzz is that it’s fuzzy, soft, fluffy hair. It’s not the same kind of hair on the coat or in the mane and tail. It’s texture is quite different, almost downy. So we want to mimic that best we can in our paintwork. How do we do that? Well, with tone and brushwork, two powerhouses that work together to help our illusion along in this  regard really well.

So to paint ear fuzz, you’ll be using your mapping brush and the paint consistency should be about 1% milk consistency. Dip and dab as usual, and paint in layers, applying these steps. Now we'll be painting dark to light most often with ear fuzz as it lends a dimensionality to them when we paint in lighter details in layers. So to that end…

• Paint the entirety of the ear fuzz in the medium darkest shade color you find in your reference. 
• Then paint strategic crevices with the darkest shade color you find in your reference.
• Now mix up some highlight colors that match your references to the consistency of about 1% milk and gently add delicate thin streaks of hair on the ear fuzz. Then just keep doing this until the ear is done to your liking, staying mindful not to obliterate your shading colors you laid in earlier.
• Do some back-and-forth adjustments as needed.
• Extra points: When you’re done, be sure to rim ears and tip them with the appropriate color as indicated by your references. 
• Note: You don’t have to just use paint and brushes for this as color pencils or pastel pencils can work nicely, too (keep them sharp). 
• Alert!: Now if the fuzzy texture is sculpted in a way that’s very textured and striated, instead opt to drybrush in the highlights rather than brush them in. To do this, paint the inner ear dark as per usual and allow that to fully dry. Then mix up a couple of highlight colors, but don’t thin them down—keep them thick. Then take a soft filbert brush that’s a little beaten up, like your dappling brush, dip it a little bit into a highlighting paint and rub out the excess on a lint-free shop towel then gently and lightly scrub this color onto the ear fuzz, just on the ridge surfaces of the ear hair. In other words, don’t jam the brush in there…just hit the tops of the sculpted ridges. Instantly, you’ll see those ridges highlight themselves in such a lovely way!

There are two things you want to avoid when painting fuzzy ears. First, don’t create a confused, messy result but keep your shadings and highlights clear. And second, don’t stray from the colors on your reference. It’s important to only use the tones you see in your photo otherwise the result may not read quite right.

Painting Shaved Ears

Alternatively, there will be occasions where you’ll need to paint the interior of shaved ears. Now the thing to note about shaved ears is that all of the ear’s anatomy will be exposed, anatomy we can capture in our pigment to add detail. Specifically, there are delicate but prominent ridges inside the flute of the ear that do well with being painted in if not sculpted, or highlighted if sculpted. To do that, simply use the vein highlighting method then gently streak in those ridges. When you’re done, don’t forget to rim the ears appropriately. Extra points: Blend the ends of the ridge streaks into the ear so they melt into the rest of the ear nicely.

There’s three things you want to avoid when painting the ridges inside shaved ears. For starters, keep the effect subtle so only use a color one or two times lighter. That minor variation will be plenty to get the point across. Second, keep a steady hand. You want that paint directly on top of the ridge and unwavering. And third, don’t go too bananas with this. There’s only about two to three ridges inside the ear, so don’t do more than that.

Conclusion to Part IV

Some people think they need innate talent to do art. I disagree. I think it takes two just things: Practice and love. That’s it. That’s all it takes. So if you’d love to do some arting, you’ve already got half the equation! Dive in! And give it enough practice. So many folks think that within five pieces they should be creating at some lofty level. It doesn’t work that way. It’ll take about ten or fifteen before you start to see some real improvements. And if you’re doing it right, you’ll have created hundreds but are still surging forwards with improvements. But that’s the glorious thing, isn’t it? The more you grow, the more room you get to grow into, like a goldfish! It keeps all this so fascinating, fun, and challenging because wouldn’t it become boring and stale if we all hit “perfect”? And besides, “perfection” is overrated. It’s an impossible illusion, too, and it hurts you in a comparison trap that does nothing for your confidence. So just darn the torpedoes and take up painting! If you’d like some guidance and structure, take a class, read and article, or watch one of the many videos online. There are a ton of resources out there at your fingertips! How cool is that? The point is—just start. Don’t allow your fears and doubts to hold you back. Life is too dang short.

So in Part V, we’ll continue our painting journey with more tricky effects that’ll add some spice to your creative brew! 

“Talent is good. Practice is better. Passion is best.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

Special Effects: How to Create Tricky Aspects of Horse Color for Beginners Part IV