realistic horse head horse drawing

How to Draw a Horse Head

Learn how to draw a horse head in all its graceful beauty. A simple step by step tutorial makes those tricky shapes a bit easier to draw.

Of all the animals there are to draw, I think horses fall into a unique category as being one of the most loved, AND one of the most tricky. Even if you just focus on the head, their chiseled profile calls for some special attention to get all the hard and soft shapes just right. After all, if you get them to align in the right way, you have a beautiful and graceful animal. But if a few are out of place, things just look a little, well … awkward.

My new horse head tutorial offers lots of support to help students draw a head with a graceful 3/4 view and keep out a lot of the guesswork. If you use my suggested 16 box grid (you can either fold your paper to get them, or use page 3 of my PDF download) you'll see that lots of the horse head lines fall right on some of the guidelines. If students pay close attention to them as they are drawing, they will really help get the size and shapes of all those curves in the right places.

Use Button below to Download a PDF Tutorial

How to Draw a Horse Head Materials

Pencil. The Ticonderoga brand are the most reliable, make nice dark lines when you need them, and are the easiest to erase. Buying the pre-sharpened ones will save busy teachers a lot of time.

Eraser. Large ones you can hold in your hand do a much better job than just the pencil tip erasers, especially when erasing leftover pencil lines after tracing.

Black Sharpie Marker. These fine point permanent marker pens make nice black outlines, have a good tip for coloring, and never bleed when they get wet. Use them with good ventilation and add extra paper underneath to protect your tables.

Prang Crayons. These are a bit softer than other crayons so they sometimes look like oil pastels. They also have a some nice brown shades that Crayola does not have unless you buy their larger boxes.

Crayola Crayons. The reliable brand that always works well. The 24 pack has some of my favorite golden orange and yellow colors that seem a bit richer and warmer than the ones Prang has.