 Hi there! It's DJB and in this video I'm going to be teaching you how to paint dapples on your model horse. Generally they signify that the horse is healthy but a lot of colors incorporate dapples that remain on the horse all season long. So method number one is the hand-painted method and I don't normally gravitate towards this method because it's a little bit tricky but I had this cannery warm blood stablemate and I was redoing him so I used just a fine point brush, nothing in particular and raw sienna golden high flow acrylic because this was the same color that I used for the base of the model. Then I'm just creating dapples using a paint brush. Now I highly recommend using a reference when painting dapples of any kind and in stablemate scale you have to make sure that they're small enough so that they don't look too big or dramatic. I like the golden high flow because it's quite thin so the paint doesn't glob on very thick. And then after I'm done with that I'm just going to take my raw umber golden high flow and pop that into my Iwata Eclipse airbrush. Airbrush over top of the coat a little bit to create kind of a smoother effect so the dapples don't look so harsh and they look more blended. I also achieved a similar look using oil paints but I'm not a pro yet so the hand painting technique can work for certain cases and I think it achieves pretty good dapples if that's what you're looking for. Method number two is my favorite and this is using pastels. So you can use just a regular pastel and shave it down into your own powder or you can use pan pastels which I highly prefer they're more concentrated. You're going to want to use a model that you have painted a base coat on. And you're going to want to make sure the base coat is very light in contrast to the color that you want the final horse to look. Dapples are lighter in contrast to the coat so you want the dapples to show up as very light and pale with the overcoat being very dark. And then you can just brush on your dark coat of pastels and I prefer to brush these pastels on with a makeup brush because they are better designed for applying powder and they work really well because they're really soft and smooth. I developed a technique in which you can actually use water and pastels to create darker layers but I will put that in a separate video because it's a complicated process. And then once you're done with the entire coat you're not going to want to seal the model and you want to make sure that you don't touch the model anywhere with your fingers when there's pastel on it. And then you're just going to take a kneaded eraser, roll it into a point to create the dapples which is just dabbing onto the pastels so that it lifts it in a dappled pattern and you can use your brush afterwards to just kind of soften the edges and create a better blend. And I think this creates a really soft dapple effect. I've also found success in using a Faber-Castell pencil eraser and you can sharpen this into a nice point. And this is better for star-type dapples or dapples you'd see in a dapple gray or really dramatic contrast-y dapples because you can pull the pastel up quite a bit more. If you have a stronger overlay you can push fairly hard to pull up the lighter undercoat like shown on this little stable-mate guy. I'm pushing pretty hard to get that pastel up. And you can do the entire model this way. I like using the pencil. It's a little more intuitive. This pencil is going to leave eraser marks on your model, a little eraser shavings. So you're going to want to use a big powdery brush to dust those off and you can use it in conjunction with the kneaded eraser as well. And you can always touch things up with a little bit of pastel in your makeup brush at the end. Alternatively, you can use the pencil eraser for some extra herring details as well and you can also paint in some of those dapples a little bit more with an acrylic paint. The golden high flow works really well on this dapple gray. I was just enhancing some of her dapples by adding an extra layer of acrylic on top. And this achieves a very dramatic contrast-y type of dapple. Now method number three, you can use an airbrush to dapple. I don't recommend this method for beginners and you need a really fancy airbrush. I use them. I want a micron and this was a $700 brush, so I don't recommend this method. You really have to dilute your paints with the reducer and it takes a lot of time and patience and you need a lot of skill. I find that this doesn't make the dapples look very realistic either. They're too soft and haloed. You need some hair texturing in between. So method number four is using pencils. And I really liked this method because I was able to airbrush a base coat on this model and then I'm able to detail it with pencils. So I use a Faber-Castell pencil crayon. I find this one works the best because it's a hard-based pencil crayon. And then I'm using a black watercolor pencil crayon from Stedler. You're basically just drawing in your dapples. So I'm using a star kind of motion to dapple over top and then adding some hair texture with that white pencil as well. I find this pencil crayon works the best because it's quite firm and it's not super waxy. So it actually creates a pretty fine line. The black watercolor pencil works really well in between. So I halo the dapples with this. So in between all of the dapples in the darkest places, I'm adding in that black and then starring over top of those dapples to make them look a little more realistic and less soft. Because I used a watercolor pencil for the black, I'm able to add in a tiny bit of water, a damp paintbrush, and kind of blend out those black areas and add some extra texturing and layering to the dapples. Thank you so much for watching and happy dappling. Please subscribe for weekly Wednesday uploads. Follow me on Instagram and Facebook at DJB Studios. Check out my website and sign up to my newsletter to be the first to know about commissions, tutorials, and sales pieces. All of the tools used in this video are in the description below. If you have any questions, feel free to message me.