stikpusher
I have a question for each of you: How do you tackle the non furry areas such as teh nose, eyes, hooves and mouth? Also do you texture the main coat or just go with the base platic texture?
Sorry for the delay, I made it back from the show but was pretty wiped out and work just about finished me off.
I have a different technique, for the non-furry areas, I use acrylics but extremely thinned and several layers. My coat colors are done in dry pigments and each layer is sealed in dull coat. So the horse has layers of coloring on his face but no real detail. I used thinned acrylics for that and yes, doog is right, getting a reference of a real horse helps a lot.
For the eyes, I also use acrylics and retarder so I can get some blending. I start with off-white over the entire eye, then I paint a black cornea, then brown with retarder, but I just leave a tiny bit of the black showing so I have it outlining the brown. A horse's pupil is horizontal, so I get black again and paint the pupil but do a very slight mix, so it's not really super stark.
Then I take a touch of brown ink and lightly hit the corners where the off white is, the streaking from the ink gives the illusion of blood vessels (and yes, I even do this on my tiny horses). After that's dry, I brush on some acrylic high-gloss and I'm done. It takes practice and helps if you have a close-up of an eye to look at.
Hooves can be either gray or shell colored, many times, if a leg is white or has a white sock, the hoof will be shell - this doesn't happen 100% of the time, but often. Horses can also have ermine (black) spots in those white areas and they can have stripes, black, brown or shell on the actual hoof. I paint my hooves again with acrylics and use colored pencils to make the stripes. Then I take a pointed Q-tip cotton swab thingy, (Tamiya has some really nice ones or you can get the pointed Q-tips at a local store usually where they sell make-up, but those fall apart really easily) and blur the lines with the Q-tip. After that, I also hit the hooves with the gloss coat.
Hair texture depends, on a solid colored horse like the black Arabian above or the one in my avatar, no. But the blue roan above I used colored pencils and tiny, tiny strokes to get the roaning. Sometimes I'll also use a 4/0 paint brush and acrylic paints. That takes a long time and I feel like I'm going to go blind, but it works and gives a great effect.
There's one model I have that the hair texture was sculpted on to begin with...so it really depends on how much detail you want to put into it and how much patience you have. 
˙ǝsɹoɥ ʎɯ uo ʞɔɐq ǝɯ ʇnd puɐ dn ǝɯ ʞɔıd ǝsɐǝןd 'sıɥʇ pɐǝɹ uɐɔ noʎ ɟı
Equine X Design
Specializing in equine model prep and finishwork.
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