Kind Of A Weird Question, But... How Do You Figure Out The Proportions For Your Centaurs? I've Been Trying

kind of a weird question, but... how do you figure out the proportions for your centaurs? I've been trying to draw a centaur OC of mine but every time i try the human body looks like a weird size in comparison to the horse body...

@snamorta asked:

Question! Do you have any advice on how to draw Centaurs? I've recently fallen in love with them but I'm having a hard time drawing one. Thank you, and I absolutely adore your art!

Grouping these together because without getting into specifics of drawing the hardest parts of both a human body and a horse and then smashing them together.. the hardest part of making a centaur look right -is- the proportion!

I also have a hard time consistently nailing the proportion of human to horse halves, and even now frequently have to lasso and shrink the human torso early in the drawing process! So if you're drawing digitally, don't be afraid to really chop up and rearrange your drawing early on until it feels right! But if you're working traditional or still having trouble visualizing them- hopefully this helps!

For guides on how to draw all the various bodyparts in more detail, I highly recommend The Etherington Brothers and their 'How to Think When you Draw' guides, I really like the way they break down shapes and structures of all kinds of subjects! Including horses and human upper bodies! They do a better job than I ever could showing how I think about anatomy and shapes, ect.

Basically a more detailed text/image described version of the infographic below the readmore!

Overall the best way to maintain general proportions for centaurs is to make a right angle over the withers/hip region and see if each arm of the angle is roughly even in length! Another way to check is to check the height of the human hip, it should fall very roughly about 2/5ths of the total height of the centaur.

These are very rough approximations that I have figured out from my years of drawing centaurs, but playing around those figures will give you various types of centaurs! With pushing the human torso a little larger and making the horse legs a little shorter you will get an individual that feels pony-sized, and making the horse body and legs a little longer you can make something that feels more like a clydesdale!

One last way i often check to see if a sketch is feeling balanced early on is to picture the human torso with normal legs! If the hooves are falling right around where human feet would be, those are either some short legs or the horse body is too small! Generally for an average centaur the height will be a bit taller than a human of the same proportion! I hope that makes sense 😅