Self Directed - Inktober

Serena Toovey
Jun 12, 2020
2 min read

I wanted to have a go at Inktober. Again, I didn't do all 31 days but I did variations of each drawing. I wanted to include horses in my drawings and I managed to find an Inktober template for horses by Jordan Hempstead. The template was posted to her Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/B2lRqnjHH8c/

I started with the Pumpkin Pony. Instead of making the horse look like a pumpkin, I thought I would design the equipment and tack for the horse. This is something I would like to do professionally in the future. I explored multiple different colour schemes, with my favourite being the orange blanket with black pumpkins. It is very appropriate for a Halloween design and reminds me of the rugs that the company Horze designed in 2019.

The next prompt was Spooky Shetland and I went ahead with the same concept. I really like both designs with the white ghosts on.

Moving away from the Halloween theme, I designed this rug for the Terrible Tennessee theme. I chose horseshoes because Tennessee Walking Horses are often abused by soring. Soring involves the intentional infliction of pain to a horse's legs or hooves in order to force the horse to perform an artificial, exaggerated gait. Caustic chemicals—blistering agents like mustard oil, diesel fuel and kerosene—are applied to the horse's limbs, causing extreme pain and suffering. There needs to be more awareness of such issues. All combinations of this design are effective and that pattern can be made bigger or smaller and used on any colour rug.

The theme for this was Zombie Zebra. I couldn't work out how to include zombie and zebra into the same piece of equipment. I decided to make zebra horse (or zorsse, which is the offspring of a zebra stallion and a horse mare. This cross is also called a zebrula, zebrule, or zebra mule. The rarer reverse pairing is sometimes called a hebra, horbra, zebrinny, zebret, or zebra hinny. Like most other animal hybrids, it is sterile.) I'm really happy with how this looks! I wanted to design some zebra equipment too, so I took segments of the zebra print and added it to the saddle pad, polo wraps and ear bonnet. I could see this being a popular set and could be developed to include a range of different animal prints.

This theme was Spidery Shire! I really enjoyed the challenge of drawing a zebra horse and so I tried to do the same with the spider concept. I had thought about drawing spiders and making a rug and equipment with that pattern but decided that might not be a popular product. The spider's web rug looks very Halloween appropriate and I really like the colours of the rug.