So your furry feline friend has you feeling inspired, eh?  Well it is no surprise that there are plenty of tutorials on the internet on how to draw the internet’s mascot, the kittayh!  But to be honest, a lot them just ain’t that good.  What I’ve done here is weeded through the garbage and hopefully retained those tutorials which I think are worth your time.

Here we go.

Let’s not mess around – let’s start with the good $#!+  Jack Hamm really breaks it down, as he tends to do, in this book on How to Draw Animals, available here on scribd.com – if you want the physical thang, go get it here on Amazon.

Polly Pinder wrote a book on the topic, you can grab it on Amazon.

Helen South has another good one on about.com. Look at the purdy kitteh!

How awesome is this? Even the master Da Vinci was rocking out some cat drawings – righteous!

This is a nice little tutorial over on dragoart.com, How to Draw a Cat Head by finalprodigy – very nice indeed!

This dark beauty was put together by Carol Rosinski.

Carol also has this guy, buddy on a blanket

Grant Fuller gets furry in his tutorial over on artistnetwork.com.

Good little primer on getting the shape and proportion of your kitty right, by the fellow over at drawing-pencil-sketches.com.

I don’t think the artist ultimately gets the proportions just right, but you can see by this example again how to use shapes to build up your final masterpiece.

Bob Davies breaking down the shapes of a cat – it’s all about the shapes man!

Now this is just funny:

Related posts:

1. How to Draw a Rose by Carol Rosinski
2. How to Draw a Horse Tutorial
3. How to Draw a Face: 25 Tutorials

This post is divided into two sections: first, the horse drawing tutorial that I have put together (immediately below); second, links out to other worthwhile tutorials on how to draw a horse.

How to Draw a Horse: the Drawn in Black Tutorial

Now let me start by saying that before this tutorial, I have never drawn a horse (that I can remember anyway). However, I know I can do better than most tutorials out there, so what I want to show you is how I would go about if I wanted to become an expert horse drawer (heh).  This method would work well for me, and it might work well for you!

First, find a good picture of horse. If I want to draw a realistic horse, the best thing to do is actually look at a horse.  If you don’t have one in your backyard, find an awesome picture online.  Some clutch resources are Flickr Commons, Wikimedia Commons, and of course Google Images.  We’re looking for pictures that are large in size, good resolution, and with proper contrast so they make nice print-outs.  Here’s a picture I found via Google Images: a pretty badass wallpaper a wild horse on its hind legs.

Next, print out the picture. The first thing I did was crop it in Photoshop so that it would fill out the entire sheet, and then printed it out:

Now the first thing I want to do is explore the shapes of this horse.  I’ll do that using my lightbox and a separate sheet of paper (don’t worry, this is NOT a tutorial on how to trace a horse).  The lightbox I’m using is the Artograph Lighttracer Elite:

Then, trace the major shape masses of the horse. Put the horse printout on the lightbox, overlay it with a sheet of paper, and then find the large shapes that make up the horse:

What this gives you now is a general sense of the shape masses of the horse and the proportion they have to one another.

Next, freestyle an outline of the horse. The final drawing will not be traced, but by tracing, our hands and minds get acquainted with the horse so that when we freehand we already have a much better sense of how all the parts fit together.

Now that we’re more familiar with the horse, let’s go ahead an sketch it out freehand (remember, we’re NOT tracing this drawing!):

Freehand the horse outline.  This was my first pass just getting the basic shapes of the horse down.  Having traced the horse before, this is much easier to get down.

Find the shade shapes. After you have the basic outline of the horse on paper, it’s time to explore in more detail and putting the outlines of the various gray values down.  I like to just go ahead and pencil in absolute black value shapes right away.

Finally, shade the horse. Here I’ve completed most of the shading using cross-hatching.  Finally I cleaned it all up a bit and darkened the outline so it would pop a bit more:

Overall, I worked fairly quickly, so there’s obviously a lot of room for improvement.  I wasn’t particularly loose, so the horse actually looks stiff.  You’ll also notice that the neck and head are a bit shrunken and that the tail could look a bit more like hair.

But if you want to learn how to draw a horse, this is how I would go about it.  Hopefully this little how to will be of benefit to you, definitely let me know in the comments what you think.

For more horse madness, here are additional horse tutorials worth your time.

More Horse Drawing Tutorials

Draw a Horse by Helen South

Short and sweet, breaks down the overall shape masses of the horse fairly well.  Definitely worth your time to study.

How to Draw a Horse by emfrank09

Video on Youtube – nicely rendered horse, always helpful to watch someone else drawing something you’re trying to get down!

How to Draw a Horse by kimibee91

Another nice tutorial on Youtube, again based on the constituent shapes of a horse.

Drawing Horses by Suz on Elfwood

Nice compilation of different aspects of drawing horses. From anatomy to various horse poses, this should definitely help you out.

Draw 50 Horses by Lee Ames

If you really want to get serious, I suggest thinking about buying a book devoted to the topic.  This is a really nice one and highly rated on Amazon.  You can also check out the book preview for some freebie tutorials

How to Draw Horses in Simple Steps by Eva Dutton

Another book worth your while, again highly rated.

Drawing Horses by Walter Foster

This book really takes a detailed look on all aspects of the horse and Walter Foster’s drawings are superb.

Drawing Made Easy Horses and Ponies by Patricia Getha

And finally, this book by Patricia Getha is great if you want to learn how to draw different types of horses.

Use our book links to support Drawn in Black! If you are thinking of buying something on Amazon, simply use this link to go to Amazon – I get a small referral commission from Amazon and you don’t pay a dime extra!  It helps me a lot in continuing this site, so thank you in advance.

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial, please let me know when you think in the comment section. Happy drawing

Related posts:

1. 10 Tutorials on How to Draw a Cat
2. “Making work makes me want to make more work” – Interview with Henry St.Leger (aka Sainty WHAT)
3. How to Draw Hands: 35 Tutorials, How-To’s, Step-by-Steps, Videos, Studies, Poses and Photo References

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