aren't you so glad you came

what did your pathway in learning to draw horses (and birds) look like? i decided to draw more horses after i began writing mvf and realised i had to learn to draw those damn horses lol. i wasn't very good at it (and i still have a lot to learn)

my issue was in the limbs. they're long and thin and there's a temptation to make them out of angles, and i see a lot of people doing this but i always found it a bit too angular and not lifelike enough.

this is the first drawing of félix i ever did where he is 100% a horse. the limbs are kinda messed up and i covered them in long feathering to hide that i didn't know how the joints worked lol but you can see the hooves are not the prettiest. He looks like he's floating or tip-toeing, not planted on the ground. So I decided I would try to incorporate more curved naturalistic shapes and also ban myself from feathering so that i would be forced to learn to make those joints read well

compare to my centaur character from like 2 days ago (most recent horse drawing):

it's still not perfect. but i think there is a better sense of weight and follow-through. i draw the muscle groups in the base sketch as well which helps round out the form. that one above was drawn without references, as you can tell, because i was lazy. idk what's going on with the front legs either

i did a lot of these from videos. for the more difficult angles i would trace the sketch from a screenshot of the video, then draw my own lines over it. I am still no good at hooves I'll fully admit that, I need to especially improve at how the weight changes the pastern angle. but yeah they ARE stylised, of course, but that's how ended up 'solving' my distaste for the highly angular looks they had before. Horses are a bouba animal (and cows are kiki). with these different characters i also have to decide how their horse halves look (pascal is Tall, the others more pony-esque, and this changes their proportions accordingly)

Yeah lots to work on still, not perfect etc etc, but I think you can see that the way I got the hang of it was to become overly invested in an AU of my characters

as for horse faces and heads... well I have a leg-up there because I was an equestrian for 9 years and i know how they move first-hand, so that's definitely my "something i experienced to which made it easier" lol. In this drawing of Félix I specifically chose a pained and stressed expression, which is conveyed through the tension around the lips, the folds of skin showing the bit being pulled on harshly, the extreme angle of the head, etc. in this drawing of Pascal i put a very tense and threatening horse in the background and even though this one isn't heavy with lines and wrinkles, you can convey this easily by using the floppy lips and bared teeth and the wild eye. the mouth area is very loose and doesn't betray much of what the skull looks like underneath so you can make angry and aggressive expressions easily by exploiting the contrast of the soft tissue and hard teeth. i always give horses their normal herbivore incisor teeth because I am a firm believer that horse teeth are more than dangerous enough as-is, and i don't need to give them dog mouths to make them look aggressive or threatening! (<- pet peeve lol. a horse with horse teeth will bite you harder and more catastrophically than a horse with dog teeth, this i guarantee)

i just love them a lot, but i ALSO have a lot of respect for them. i think that helps. i don't find them inherently comedic or funny, i think they are beautiful and expressive and very fun to draw

as for birds!!! well i just love wings so much and (in contrast to how expressive horses can be in the face area) i love the harsh and almost expressionless look of a bird's face and beak. i think you have to really like something to want to draw it over and over lol. IF you want a good place to find animal reference images (a little harder if it's wild animals instead of horses lol) you can go to iNaturalist or ebird. tracing them is fine, trace them for as long as you need

i think it's fun how you're starting from a drawing-humans point because it's the opposite for me. i was drawing animals long before i even tried drawing people. but the process was kinda the same... you have to love and respect the subject in some deep way. otherwise you wouldn't pour hours into it. i stylise humans the same way (rounded forms, sparing lines) as my animals because i like how it looks. i think if you just extend your human art ethos instead of thinking of birds as some completely other universe, it could help.