Introduction
I often speak of “artistic exercises” when I write how-tos, but what do I mean? Well, every realistic equine artist should have an arsenal of basic tactics they can use to check themselves or better prepare themselves for the job at hand. I refer to these tactics as “exercises” because that’s what they really are: Putting us through our paces to get us back on track. And we should be applying them liberally in preparation to and during our process to stay on point. In this way, they also happen to make tremendous problem-solving strategies to find our way out of the weeds whether it be in sculpture or painting.
The thing is, it’s alarmingly quick and easy to get off kilter as we sculpt or paint. It often happens right under our nose, too, as our perception skews things off alignment or out of scale. For instance, this can be typical with very complicated areas or areas demanding of intense attention making them vulnerable to regimentation such as dappling, ticking, and pinto patterns. But if we can apply these exercises throughout our process, chances are we’ll ping our goals much more accurately.
So to help beef up your own exercises, here are my top five that I find particularly helpful beforehand to prepare and during the process to stay accurate. So letsa go! (said like Mario!)…
Top Five Exercises
#1 Tracing: Digitally on your computer in a photo editing program, make a tracing of a reference photo, like say, of a head, from the side. You want that photo to be as perfectly on-the-side as possible. Use the paintbrush tool with red “paint” to make your tracing so it really pops out, and do it on another layer so you can pop images underneath it. Then use that reference photo and sketch it out. The sketch doesn’t have to be fancy, simply focusing on the structure and placements and proportions will do. Now take a photo of that with your phone (making sure it’s a quality full-on flat view and not at an angle), get that into your computer (I usually text the photo to my computer) and pop it underneath your red tracing. Now scale and align things the best you can. Wherever they align is where you nailed it, but wherever they're off is where you went askew. Make note.
Do this enough times and you begin to see patterns in your perception skews that you can then work to correct. Like maybe you have a propensity to place your eyes too low and make them too large, or maybe the nostrils are often too sloping off the end of the schnoz and too angled, or maybe your mouth and teardrop bones are misaligned a lot. Well, doing this exercise many times over will make all those unwanted tendencies pop out. And that’s just it, you want to ferret out your habitual skews to bomp them back into alignment.
In fact, you can use a variation of this tactic to keep your sculpture in check, too. Simply snap photos of your piece with your phone, and pop it under your tracing. This is especially useful for heads which can skew out of alignment or proportion very quickly.
#2 Window: For painting something complicated like a dapple grey, ticking, sooties, pinto patterns (especially lacy ones), or just any coat color typified by complex aspects, try this tactic. Print your reference out on photo paper in the scale of your piece. And use photo paper, not printer paper as you want to preserve as much detail, crispness, and color saturation as possible (even better, use a tablet). Now take a piece of printer paper, and cut out in the middle of it a little square. For a 1:9 scale, that square can be about 1”, for smaller scales scale it down and for larger, you can scale it up a bit. Now lay that little window onto your printout and go over areas of the body, making mental note of where you are on the body.
What this method does is to remove distraction of The Big Picture for the actual effects and textures and tonal shifts by making you focus on a very specific area on the reference. Do this enough times and your Eye will train on the very complicated color shifts and details quickly so when you lift that printer paper off, your Eye will be more sensitive to hyper-focus on an area better. Indeed, this really makes roan and dapple grey “grain” pop out, the complicated color play on sooties more obvious, and the complex interlay of ticking or lacy effects much more readable. In short, it’s a tremendous translation tool for scale, lay, and accuracy. And now that your Eye is thusly trained, often times you won’t need to lean into this tactic so much because it’ll already apply that “window” to its processing and you’ll just see all this much more naturally.
#3 Comparison: For sculpture, make a very specific pile of references, of say “Arabian mares,” or “Marwari stallions,” “Warmblood gelding,” or “Clydesdale foals,” all of them full side-view as possible, no angles or odd perspectives. Now take your set of sliding calipers (something like this) and start making proportional comparisons all based on the head. That’s to say, take the head measurement from right behind the ears to tip of the (unpooked) muzzle and use that measurement to make comparisons of that head length to areas of the body and legs. What this does is train a mental library of the intrinsic individual variation within each breed or type and between breeds or types. And being able to See individual or breed variations is incredibly important to not only ping breed type, but to do so in a respectful, individualistic way. The thing is, all our Arabians, Quarter Horses, Thoroughbreds, Lipizzaners, etc. should all look breedy, but they should also be individuals with their own unique characteristics and proportions. That’s to say, they should portray unique, individual souls and not cookie-cutters in our portfolio. Not only does this explore equidom better, and really inject more interest and challenge into your work, but it’s also more thoughtful to the dignity of this fine creature. When we stop objectifying them based on a “perfect” ideal and really start seeing them as individuals, it’s amazing how a paradigm shift happens for the better!
Now for painting, make a very specific pile of references of, for example, “frame overo,” or “wild ticked sabino,” or “sooty dappled palomino,” or “medium dapple grey,” or “classic silver dapple.” And sometimes you have to separate them into breed piles, too, as genetic pools can skew these colors into their own characteristics. For instance, Shetlands and minis often have a very different expression of silver dapple than say, a hairy cob or Rocky Mountain Horse. So stay sensitive to breed/gene pool variations. So now take one pile and lay those photos out and start making your comparisons between them. What makes them similar? What makes them different? What specific characteristics about each one make them distinctly in that “family” of color or pattern? How does each one diverge? Where is your fudge factor? Where is it not? Creating a mental library of the key characteristics of each color family or pattern family while at the same time understanding where you can bend these characteristics is key to pinging it all more accurately in our paintwork. Do this enough times and you can often then paint a color or pattern without being so dependent on a reference, giving you a lot more autonomy for doing the other side. Sure we can flip over our reference for the other side, but that doesn’t always work so well all the time, does it? But if we already knew where to go, we have a lot more agency for getting it right “blind.”
#4 Invert: For coat effects like dappling and complicated pinto or appaloosa patterns, consider this approach — invert the colors of your reference. To do this, take your reference and pop it into a photo editing program then find the “invert colors” option and there ya go! The lights become dark and the darks become light and — bam — does that stereotypical pattern pop out a lot more! And being in such a fresh new visual, it can really knock your habitual perception for a loop, which is exactly what you want when painting these effects to help avoid formula or regimentation. In other words, by coming at the problem from a different angle, you gain a better shot at hitting your mark. This is an especially powerful tool for pinging dappling patterns such as on greys, roans, sooties, champagnes, and even seasonal dappling. Now yes, it’s a bit of a shock and takes some getting used to, but it can be a very useful tool for getting those dappling patterns on point better.
#5 Scaling: Take your reference photo(s) and use a photo editing program to scale them to the exact size, or as close as you can get, to the actual piece you’re going to paint or sculpt. Then print it out on photo paper to that scaled size and work from that, in addition to your normally sized references (to see detail better). Or consider this kind of scaling on a tablet for new view. See, what this does is automatically scale things down or up for you, giving you something far more objective and tangible to work from than having to scale up or down in your mind which can inadvertently skew things out of proportion. Make your references do the work for you!
This is a super powerful tool for painting, such as for dappling, roaning, sabinos, complex pintos or appaloosas, and for sculpting, such as for heads, legs, muscling, and detailing. It just gives you a more accurate key to work by to keep things in scale. Because that’s the big deal with realistic equine sculpture — scale. Get that right in as many aspects as possible, and you’re almost guaranteed to create a realistic piece. So anything we can do to helps us target it better will be a super handy ability in our skillset!
Bonus tip: Sketch! Do lots and lots and lots of sketches! Seriously — lots. And they don’t have to fully fleshed out sketches either, but just those that work on proportion, placement, planes, and articulations mostly. In essence, think of approaching these exercise sketches as a kind of practice for blocking-in the initial structures on an armature more than fully realized pieces. What you’re doing is practicing over and over these key qualities so you develop more of an Eye for it on your sculptures.
Conclusion
The more we put ourselves through our paces, the better for our art, and this means one thing: Doing something over and over and over again. That’s what most of this boils down to — volume. Because make no mistake, volume counts! Excellence isn’t achieved by a potter focusing on one pot fanatically, but on making a bajillion bad pots before learning how to make them well. That’s how learning art works. So think of these exercises as a kind of shorthand to do that without having to make sculptures or paintjobs by the metric ton. They can help you get to where you want to go developmentally faster and often more effectively than most anything else.
So spend some time for this kind of R&D in your busy schedule, and make it a regular habit before and during each sculpture or paintjob, and sooner than you think, you might find your work improving in good measure, faster and more targeted than before. This is because these techniques tend to target another things besides scale: Our blindspots. And it’s in our blindspots where our errors reside. So the more we can dredge them up to the surface for scrutiny, the faster our work is going to progress and in more technically accurate ways. And discovering our blindspots isn’t only often surprising, it’s exciting! It’s kinda like a treasure hunt of sorts because you not only see where you’re off, but how to fix it all in one go! Because there’s nothing like a problem seen than a problem solved, right? So put on your proverbial artistic running shoes and hit the track to discover just how much potential is still brewing inside of you!
“Success is a worn down pencil.”
— Robert Rauschenberg
