Art - a fun way to learn conformation!
© 1996-2005 Claudia Coleman and Kristine Carroll All Rights Reserved

Lesson 3 Light and Shadow

Now that you've had a chance to play with your new pencils and watch lots of horses we are going to play around with the one thing that can really give life to a drawing.

Firstly, natural light comes really from one source, the sun. It can be subtle on an overcast day, or smashingly stark on a bright day. What it really does for us is to show us how massive and round and powerful a horse is. By mastering the use of strong light ("chiaroscuro "is the arrangement of light and dark in a work of art) we can simplify the whole animal with just a few shadows.

There are sorts of primaries and secondaries and I've done a few doodles to show you. Now the key to this new super tool is to make sure that the direction from whence the light comes does not change in your drawing. One little trick is to simply lay a pencil flat on the paper and pretend it is a ray of light, then you can see what areas of the horse would not get the light on them and they are then in the shadows. For prime viewing of super shadows and dramatic effect, the late afternoon, almost evening is great light for art.

A great deal of mood can be generated with the use of light and what time of day it is. Noon can really feel hot in a drawing... it is sort of non-directional time of day and it can give that "captured" feeling. This is hard to explain, but one exercise that is the most useful to you is to plan a day (or over a couple of days) and at certain times draw your horse in the same place but with different angles of light. maybe you can get a friend to help you by providing the model and she can have one of the drawings! Once you start doing this, you will decide what time of day had the effect you like best. (Light differs from season to season as well. Visit a spot at the barn in December, March, June, and September and you will see a difference as well.)

Getting some shadows on the horse also requires that we anchor him to the ground (remember my favorite word). Here again use an extra pencil and lay it on the paper to be the ray of light. Keeping it in the same angle figure out where the shadow of the body will hit the ground by using it like a ruler. Then you have a little pattern to show the shadow of the horse on the ground.

Another aspect of light we will only touch lightly here is reflected light. This is always there in varying degrees and if you were doing the basics of the egg, the box,, etc. you would have to show it. In horses it shows up most in color work. For instance, the belly of a white horse will reflect the color of the ground underneath him. If he is on a light surface such as sand, his underbelly, inner legs and throat will have shadow but with lots of detail. Go look at Yo Yo on my home page. This is a good example if I do say so myself!

Now spend some time on this exercise -- take those stick horses, make them look like they are standing on the ground, and use strong shadows to define the mass of the horse!

Weight

Someone once said, "you can't highlight anything until you anchor it to the ground." You'll hear me refer to this valuable witticism many times because it is a real key to fine art. One of the ways to apply this principle is by showing weight in your animal. After all, he probably weighs 1300 pounds and if you've drawn him sort of hovering about an inch off the ground we just won't get the picture of HORSE.

Feet and ankles are where weight is really detected in motion. There is an advertisement for Adequan that is running in a lot of horse journals (July 12, 1996 issue of the Chronicle it was on page 35) that really shows you how the foot and pastern take up shock. It is so extreme is almost hurts to look at it, but this specific moment of stress happens all the time, but it is so quick we never really see it.... we're too busy gasping that he made the jump!

What actually happens is the the joints of the foot and pastern flex more than normal. The most often overlooked joint is where the pastern meets the pedal bone and it is hidden within the hoof wall just below the coronet band. So when we are drawing our favorite animal we just sort of make the hoof an extension of the pastern. When the horse is standing still that's exactly what it looks like. But when he is in motion that's a different story.

Good farrier practice says that a line bisecting the pastern and the hoof should be straight and not broken from the center of the ankle to the ground. All those ligaments hold everything really tight so that little joint doesn't move too much. However when he moves that line is broken. Draw a lower leg and hoof standing and then draw the leg landing in that advertisement. WOW ..... big diff! Learning to see how the foot hits the ground will really improve your horses, so go to the barn and sketch feet and ankles. You can do a lot of that with our little stick-e-quines or get more refined with more finished drawings. You will also discover there are a myriad of different hoof shapes too and no two feet are exactly alike!

Lesson 1: Bones and Angles
Lesson 2: Perspective
Lesson 3: Light and Shadow and Weight