Modeling a Draft Horse

A Belgian Draft horse

This summer I went to Galleria Romanelli to work on modelling a draft horse. I had never modeled a horse before so it was an interesting learning process. The main thing i wanted to try to capture in this project was the strength and movement of the horse.

Rough sketch and making of the armature

Covering the armature

I tried to look at images of horse anatomy to find where the different major muscles were

A problem I found was the back legs looked to canine. This was caused because the armature wire was not correctly bent.

I used images from the internet, and a book in the workshop called “Animals in motion” to help guide me as i did not have access to a draft horse.

In order to fix the issue I had to remove the leg and cut the wire to restructure it.

With the leg corrected to a better angle I turned attention to trying to make sure the muscles were in the correct position and not too big or too small

I also experimented with different tool textures and with using turpentine and rubbing alcohol to soften the clay to give different affects

Then I modeled the eyes

I then work on improving the hooves

I used canned air to spot freeze parts of the face for very small modeling

Finished version