Usually I have time to freehand my drawings but there are occasions when my creativity is challenged and for those times I turn to looking for stock pictures on DeviantArt.com and then ask permission from the stock image provider to reference the poses.
*Horse pose that inspired me & used for this, is based off of a photo taken by ArabianHorseStock9 from DeviantArt, and used with permission*
http://arabianhorsestock9.deviantart.com/art/Sugar-4-82681345
I use Adobe Photo Shop CS3 and do it like this...
I draw out my base coat then save it to my PC after scanning it.*no bothering to do eyes since they will be done in PS*
Next I add my base colors. I ususally will Google a color to reference from. Like for instance on this Amber Champagne arabian coat...I Googled a champagne horse saved it, and then opened it in photoshop right next to my coat I am working on. So you will have two images open in photoshop. Now...open that image (if you've choesen one to reference coat color from) to see the colors and how the highlights and shadow colors look. Pick the medium color in the coat (you can do this by selecting the paint bucket tool, then click on the top colored square and hover your mouse over the image you are using for color reference and it will automatically show the colors as you hover and scroll around with the cursor.)
and use your paint bucket to "fill" your base coat image with that color.Then add shadows in 2-3 different colors (again based on the referenced color coat) and highlight color by painting them on with a standard paint brush set on 100% opacity.
then use a standard smudge brush (usually like a size 14-20 ..the bigger the brush the smother blending effect you get, set on about 80% strength and blend my colors together to my liking, or as realistically as I possibly can
then clean up where you went outside the lines with the eraser, and take the image and put it on a new 800 x 800 window with the background the same color as Howrse's yellow, (when I blend the mane and tail it saves the feathered edges better IMO)
then I blend up the mane and tail using another standard smudge brush from the "assorted brushes" menu...it looks like a triangle with 3 dots...make your brush about an 11 size or 12 then set it on 86% strength... now you can blend up your mane Once that is done I paint in the eye, then add any additional tweaks like highlights on the hooves or extra highlights on the body etc...then save it as a jpeg about 3-4% quality which gives me a nice low file size. Then I bring it back up in Adobe Photoshop again and on Adobe they have this really cool tool, it erases the entire background (called the magic eraser I believe) so I set that on about 35 tolerance, erase the yellow background, and bring up the standard BP format and drag my image over onto that and save it as a PNG file. I usually get about a 260kb file
here is the finished product (sorry this is a super low res file but when it's small like the 300 x 300 Howrse size you don't see ANY low res anything)
and game sized
*Horse pose that inspired me & used for this, is based off of a photo taken by ArabianHorseStock9 from DeviantArt, and used with permission*
http://arabianhorsestock9.deviantart.com/art/Sugar-4-82681345
I use Adobe Photo Shop CS3 and do it like this...
I draw out my base coat then save it to my PC after scanning it.*no bothering to do eyes since they will be done in PS*
Next I add my base colors. I ususally will Google a color to reference from. Like for instance on this Amber Champagne arabian coat...I Googled a champagne horse saved it, and then opened it in photoshop right next to my coat I am working on. So you will have two images open in photoshop. Now...open that image (if you've choesen one to reference coat color from) to see the colors and how the highlights and shadow colors look. Pick the medium color in the coat (you can do this by selecting the paint bucket tool, then click on the top colored square and hover your mouse over the image you are using for color reference and it will automatically show the colors as you hover and scroll around with the cursor.)
and use your paint bucket to "fill" your base coat image with that color.Then add shadows in 2-3 different colors (again based on the referenced color coat) and highlight color by painting them on with a standard paint brush set on 100% opacity.
then use a standard smudge brush (usually like a size 14-20 ..the bigger the brush the smother blending effect you get, set on about 80% strength and blend my colors together to my liking, or as realistically as I possibly can
then clean up where you went outside the lines with the eraser, and take the image and put it on a new 800 x 800 window with the background the same color as Howrse's yellow, (when I blend the mane and tail it saves the feathered edges better IMO)
then I blend up the mane and tail using another standard smudge brush from the "assorted brushes" menu...it looks like a triangle with 3 dots...make your brush about an 11 size or 12 then set it on 86% strength... now you can blend up your mane Once that is done I paint in the eye, then add any additional tweaks like highlights on the hooves or extra highlights on the body etc...then save it as a jpeg about 3-4% quality which gives me a nice low file size. Then I bring it back up in Adobe Photoshop again and on Adobe they have this really cool tool, it erases the entire background (called the magic eraser I believe) so I set that on about 35 tolerance, erase the yellow background, and bring up the standard BP format and drag my image over onto that and save it as a PNG file. I usually get about a 260kb file
here is the finished product (sorry this is a super low res file but when it's small like the 300 x 300 Howrse size you don't see ANY low res anything)
and game sized