Step 1

First we’ll start off with a photograph of an equestrian horse jumping. This one is from iStockphoto.com, feel free to use whatever picture you’d like.

Step 2

Open your picture in Adobe Illustrator. Trace an outline of the horse and rider with the pen tool. Don’t worry too much about the tail or mane, just give it a nice outline- we’ll work on the details of those areas later.

Step 3

Tweak the finished outline of the horse. You may need to use object > path > simplify… to smooth out your work.

Step 4

Now we’ll make a brush to add some of the fancy curls and swirls for the long hair details of the horse. Start by making a circle with the shape tool. than use the direct selection tool, , to grab the bottom point and pull it down. The result should be something like below.

Step 5

To make this shape into a brush we’ll go to the brushes palette and select “new brush…”

Step 6

Select Art Brush.

Step 7

In the option box match the settings below.

Step 8

Now we’ll start to add in some of the hair. This uses a combination of techniques that you can choose from and mix and match to create the hair. The first is the arc tool. Draw an arc on the tail to start making some of the detail hair. Repeat as necessary and if needed you can alt click the canvas with the arc tool to bring up the arc tool’s options.

Step 9

The other technique to use is the spiral tool,. Again, alt click the canvas with the spiral tool to bring up its options. After some use of the arc and spiral tools you should come up with something resembling this:

Step 10

Now all we need to do is the mane. You can continue to use the same two spiral and arc techniques, but since its smaller, finer hair I went for the brush tool. If you double click the brush tool you can bring up its settings. It helps if you turn up the smoothing. Then, just use the custom brush that we’ve been using, turn the stroke width down a little, and start drawing some hair on top of the horse’s neck. Here’s what it should look like.

Finished Product