Todays doodles are Myras personal Horse Acting Guide! 🐴
DISCLAIMER: im not a horse expert, but i’ve been hobby riding for 13 years and read some books through the years, so it’s just my personal experience. I dont know everything and people have different ways!
Hello, I am a horse expert! I’ve worked with them my whole life including professionally for several years. This is a good guide but I wanted to add a few things:
- A well balanced, well trained horse will carry weight in the back end in motion, but normally their weight is actually more towards the front. (Think about it - they’re designed to spend most of their time with their heads down, grazing - the back end is mostly for propulsion.) That said, their back legs are much more maneuverable/flexible than the front ones and can even kick out pretty far sideways. In motion in the wild you’ll generally see horses balanced much more “on the forehand” (towards the front) unless they are specifically showing off, or scared of something (getting ready to potentially bolt). - The licking/chewing thing isn’t just while working! It’s something baby horses will do a lot around older horses, a lot of times as a “okay I’m sorry I won’t try that again” kind of thing. - In addition to telescoping, horses ears can also go sideways to ~50 degrees. - The lip curl thing can also be an “I’m having fun!” response or a “you just found the BEST scritchy spot” response. - Even an alert horse will often rest one of its back legs if it’s just standing in the same way people will stand with one hip cocked.. They are ‘handed’ as well, so a lot of times you’ll see horses who have a preference to lean on one side! - Horses are SUPER QUIET. Like, really really quiet. Most of the time all you are going to hear a horse do is snort/blow through its lips, if anything at all. If a horse neighs at you it is a VERY HAPPY DAY OH MY GOSH MY PONY LOVES ME. - Speaking of ponies: they’re not baby horses. They’re a smaller sub-type of horses in the way that toy dog breeds are just smaller dogs. They have a specific set of physical characteristics that can differentiate them from horses, like shorter legs, thicker manes and tails, and adorable teeny tiny ears. They’re also generally stockier. They are also full of themselves (we have a saying: “the closer they are to the ground, the closer they are to the devil”). These types of features can really help you differentiate in your art! There are a ton of different breeds of horses that can all look unique but the differentiation between ‘horse’ characteristics and ‘pony’ characteristics is an important one. (This isn’t to say we don’t cutesily refer to all horses as ponies sometimes though!) - Baby and young horses have really, really, REALLY long legs on spindly little hooves. This, along with generally lankiness, is the big way you can often tell a ‘teenage’ horse from an adult. They fill out a lot as they age. - Elderly horses are most easily spotted by a swayback (dips down dramatically in the middle). They also may have duller coats. - A swishing tail doesn’t always mean a horse is agitated - it can also just be using it to help balance as it moves, or just because it wanted to swish away a fly. The rest of its body language can usually help you tell the difference.
Horse personalities are all super different, but the ways they communicate those different personalities can be pretty subtle if you don’t know where to look. Luckily horse people LOVE to take pictures/videos of their horses doing silly and/or cute things and there are tons and tons of ways you can find that info - right now, the big platform seems to be Instagram (#pferd and other German tags are used on videos from all over as well as your typical #horse #pony etc) but there’s a lot of videos on Youtube as well.
The gold standard of “how to animate horse language” is still Spirit (the movie, not the show) and even if it’s not your stylistic or narrative cup of tea I think it’s worth a watch just because they really did their research in how horses express themselves.
so someone just said they’re “really interested in history” how careful do you have to be?
“i just think history is interesting in general! i’m not interested in any specific part of it”: this person is most likely safe. never drop your guard though
“i’m interested in this specific subject or time period in history. (ex. ancient egypt, the golden age of piracy, the history of the printing press”: still probably safe. be on the lookout for certain risky historical subjects. you should know them you see them
“i’m really into WW2 history”: this is the caution zone, there’s plenty of valid reasons to be into WW2, but if they start talking about how Operation Sealion totally could have succeeded, it’s time to abort
“i’m specifically into roman history, the crusades, prussian military history, and WW2”: danger! do NOT talk about history with this person. in fact, do not talk to this person at all. you will regret it, you do not want to know what they think of the treaty of versailles or why germany lost the first world war
