Shadowing Practice: 3 tips to make drawing horses easy(er) 🐴 - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Horses are the bane of many an artist.

They are big, lanky and not commonly kept in cities and population centres, which means that most people don't have frequent contact or familiarity with them.

As a certified horse girl of many many years, I'm here to share with you some tips on how I draw horses to hopefully allow you to do the same.

The key to drawing anything well is being able to simplify it down to its basic shapes.

I picture a horse's body as two connected spheres, effectively forming a bean shape.

The head is a wedge with the tip knocked off and spheres for the muzzle and cheek planes.

Put these together, add some lines to show neck, tail and legs with circles for the joints and and triangles for the hooves and we have a horse.

But how the hell do I know where to put everything?

This is a horse.

Just like people, horses come in a vast array of different shapes and sizes.

However, for our purposes, we're going to generalise a little bit.

Don't worry if it's a lot of information to take in at first.

I put a cheat sheet and some resources in the video description and if you're stuck on something, you can always use references.

I've locked the skeleton in to illustrate the useful landmarks more clearly.

The horse's head is approximately the same length as its neck, the depth of its girth, the distance between its elbow and its fetlock joint on the foreleg,

the distance between its shoulder and its wither, between the ground and its hock joint, and between the hock joint and the siphle joint.

The hop joint is even with the chestnuts on its forelegs, which are located just above the knee joint.

The elbow and stifle joints are roughly in line.

The point of the buttock is slightly higher than the shoulder joint.

The length of the body is about two and a half to three times the length of the head, and the distance between the ground and the horse's withers, which is the high point of its shoulder,

is roughly equal to the distance between the point of its shoulder to its buttocks.

Hence the saying that a good horse is square.

Onto the head itself, the eyes are located roughly a third down the central line of the face

which is essentially an elongated diamond shape.

The mouth ends roughly one-sixth the way along the face and the cheekbones roughly one-third of the way down.

The eyes, ears and nostrils can be placed on the head at 45 degree angles from the central line.

Keeping these proportions in mind will help you

when constructing the drawing of your horse and if something feels off you can and always check your drawing against them.

My third and final tip for drawing horses well is practice.

Get familiar with their skeletal structure, their muscular structure.

Use references, trace images.

If you're able to go and see a horse in real life then do that.

Or watch videos to learn how they move.

Draw them a lot.

You'll begin to see how the basic proportional rules apply and that sometimes they don't.

With repetition and practice you'll develop the muscle memory of the shapes

and proportions that make up a horse and eventually you might even find it easy.

Well that's all for today everyone, hope you enjoyed the video and stay tuned for the next one.

Thank you.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This video has 39 sentences and 588 words to shadow. The speech runs for 4:28. The speaker talks at a steady 132 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 82% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
roughly adverb	/ˈɹʌf.li/	In a rough manner; without kindness, softness, or gentleness.
proportion noun	/pɹəˈpɔɹʃən/	A quantity of something that is part of the whole amount or number.
locate verb	/ˈloʊˌkeɪt/	To place; to set in a particular spot or position.
sphere noun	/sfɪɚ/	A surface in three dimensions consisting of all points equidistant from a center. .
elbow noun	/ˈɛlboʊ̯/	The joint between the upper arm and the forearm.
hawk noun	/ˈhɔːk/	A diurnal predatory bird of the family Accipitridae, smaller than an eagle.
vast adjective	/væst/	Very large or wide (literally or figuratively).
bone noun	/boʊn/	A composite material consisting largely of calcium phosphate and collagen and making up the skeleton of most vertebrates.
muscle noun	/ˈmʌs.əl/	A contractile form of tissue which animals use to effect movement.
ear noun	/ˈɪə̯/	The organ of hearing, consisting of the pinna or auricle, auditory canal, eardrum, malleus, incus, stapes and cochlea.
diamond noun	/ˈdaɪ.ə.mənd/	A glimmering glass-like mineral that is an allotrope of carbon in which each atom is surrounded by four others in the form of a tetrahedron.
essentially adverb	/ɪˈsɛnʃəli/	In essence: by nature.
sheet noun	/ʃit/	A thin bed cloth used as a covering for a mattress or as a layer over the sleeper.
resource noun	/ɹɪˈzɔːs/	Something that one uses to achieve an objective, e.g. raw materials or personnel.
angle noun	/ˈæŋ.ɡəl/	A figure formed by two rays which start from a common point (a plane angle) or by three planes that intersect (a solid angle).

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
make up verb	/ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/	To constitute, to compose.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	are located · can be placed
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	centres, which means · forelegs, which are · withers, which is

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 10 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, you'll, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: sixth /sɪksθ/, wither /ˈwɪðɚ/, girth /ɡɝθ/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: proportion /pɹəˈpɔɹʃən/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, sheet /ʃit/, repetition /ˌɹɛp.əˈtɪʃ.ən/
Long words — get the stress right: essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, familiarity /fəmɪliˈæɹɪti/, generalize /ˈd͡ʒɛn.(ə.)ɹə.laɪz/, repetition /ˌɹɛp.əˈtɪʃ.ən/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like roughly, proportion, locate.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: 3 tips to make drawing horses easy(er) 🐴 - Learn English Speaking with Video

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