 Hi there! It's DJB, and in this video I'm going to teach you a couple different methods on how to add Roaning to your model horse custom. Roaning is a super awesome technique that allows you to create really dynamic pieces that involve realistic hair texturing and aging. First things first, you want to make sure you understand the hair growth pattern of the horse. Horses have a very unique pattern in which their hairs grow. I highly recommend using the Atlas of Animal Anatomy, and this is a book that you can get on Amazon which will be linked in the description below. It has the hair growth chart as well as a bunch of really awesome anatomy diagrams. The method number one is using pencils. So I'm using a Faber-Castell pencil crayon, but you can also use watercolor crayons, prismacolor pencil crayons, or even a white charcoal. You have to experiment and always keeping a pencil sharpener on hand. You're gonna want to start with a model that has a good base coat on it. This particular horse is a blue ron, so I painted him in a kind of a gray color, and then we're going to add white hair and details over top. Using the larger hole of your pencil sharpener, you're able to create a more defined point if you use that hole. I like using the Faber-Castell pencil crayon because it's not super waxy, so it creates kind of a fine line, and it was a little bit firmer so it doesn't break so much. And then you're just gonna want to draw on your little hairs in the pattern of the hair growth very slowly. So this is a very time-consuming process. It's gonna take you a while to complete a traditional model. So you can't rush it, you have to go slow, and you have to make sure that your hairs are in scale. If they look too big, the model's gonna look off. It's not gonna do well at shows. They have to be in proportion to the actual size of the model. Now it's not always necessarily about making individual hairs as much as making clusters of hairs, so you want to overlap your lines a little bit so that some of them are a little darker in sections and there's not hair in some sections. When it comes to the flank area you have to be quite careful about making sure that the direction of the hair growth is accurate. There's quite a little swirl that happens in the flank area and you're just gonna go about going with the entire model. I like to do it in chunks and I like to take lots of breaks. Now you can use your finger to kind of brush off some of the little pencil residue chunks that show up and also blend out the work that you're doing and make sure not to handle the model too much because this stuff will rub off. You can seal the model in phases too if you feel like you're gonna be touching it too much. If you screw up at any point you can use a kneaded eraser to lift some of that pencil and remove it from the model. This works pretty well. The stuff comes off pretty easily and for areas such as the legs you want to fan out the hairs so that they get significantly smaller almost like little dots because as we blend into the leg of the horse the roaning actually goes away so that the legs are completely black. The body is the only part that is containing your roaning so just adding really small little pieces at the tops of the stockings really can make a realistic difference in your custom work. It was a very subtle way of roaning that's not too complicated and pretty easy to do just time-consuming. Method number two is hair by hair. Now for this I use a Windsor and Newton triple zero paint brush especially for stable mates. You can use up to the size zero for traditionals and I find that golden high-flow titanium white works the best and you're just gonna do the same thing you did with the pencil but you're using paint. The golden high-flow works really well because you don't need to dilute it. It goes on fairly white but when it dries it very translucent weight so the base coat of your model will really show through. This is super delicate and you have to be really careful not to glob up your paint so you want to dab out a lot of the paint before you even go but these Windsor and Newton paint brushes make it really easy because they absorb the paint to the top of the brush and then you're using a supply of that paint in the tip. You really don't need to fill your brush with paint very often. You can get several strokes out of this paint brush before you need to dip it back in the paint so this combination works really really well but it's also very time-consuming and you can't rush or your hairs are gonna look too long in places and too little in others and the same thing you kind of want to build it up in clumps versus individual hairs. I have another example here using a Windsor and Newton paint which didn't work as well and this paint brush was kind of fighting me but this is a good example because you can get away with using a cheaper paint brush or different brands of paint. It is personal preference and I just find that the golden works the easiest. I struggled with this model a little bit as the brush was bending and warping and the hairs weren't coming out as much as hairs as I would like them to. It was more of a stippling action on this particular custom. Method number three is using a fan brush. I picked up this little fan brush at Michaels. It's just a regular I don't know artist Princeton brush and I'm able to create really awesome hair texture pretty easily. So you want to water down your paint pretty good and kind of smudge it into the brush and you're gonna use a lot of layers for this method so I'm using a layers of black and white to create the running with this model. You're gonna go slow but it's gonna give you quite a few hairs at one time so instead of painting individual hairs you're actually painting multiple hairs. Working on this Otheo custom that was really beneficial because this model would take way too long doing individual hairs and I'm just gonna go back and forth from white to black until I get kind of the feeling that there's roaning going on so it's not just white hairs on top of the body but all the hairs are intermix. The paint I used for this is Golden High Flow as well just a combination of the black and titanium white so you can experiment with what you feel but it's the easiest paint to work with this brush because it doesn't need the dilution like I said before and I think that this look turned out really awesome and the finished models I've been able to get with this fan brush have been really exciting so this is a unique technique that you can play around with. Just don't be afraid to tackle a Rhone. It's a really satisfying process when you can nail it. Thank you so much for watching and happy roaning. 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.