 Hi there it's DJB and in this video I'm going to be teaching you how to paint realistic mains and tails. When I first started customizing I didn't pay any attention to the mains and tails. I would paint them a solid color of whatever the coat pattern implied. So if the model had a black main and tail it was simply just painting it with black acrylic. I got some comments on my work saying that the hair lacked detail. It's about creating texture within the sculpture. So now I add a lot of highlights lowlights and texture. When it comes to paint horses the portion of the body that is white if it goes along the hairline of the main or the tail that portion of the hair will also be white and depending what color the body is say bay the main will be black in the bay areas of the paint markings. Some paints have a gradient in their tails where they go from black to white or white to black and you can't disregard solid colors either. Horses with black mains often have sun bleached tips so you want to add some browns and highlights within the black portion as well. It's not something to be overlooked and I see a lot of artists really missing the opportunity when it comes to adding texture to the hair. No matter what color it is you should always be adding some kind of shading to add depth to your custom work. So in order to do this I start with a fully finished model and make sure I wear rubber glove so that I don't wreck the finish of the horse. I'm going to be using Joe Sanja acrylic paint in black and titanium white. I'm just going to start by brushing that on with a medium sized brush as a solid base coat. So you're just going to fill in the main depending on the sculpture in whatever color your horse is supposed to be. The top of his tail will be black and the top of his main will be black but the bottom of his tail will be white. Then I'm also going to add in the little fine details of the main falling down to the neck with a fine point brush as well. And I'm just going to highlight in some white. So this is a very slow working process where you're adding both white and black in many layers. So I tend to gravitate towards painting the sculpture as seen. Tallest points of the hair texture have a highlight and the low divots in the main have a low light. So for this example the divots of this horse's mane are black and then the upper strands that are raised on the sculpture. I add some white to that. Using a variant of water in some of my layers using water on the white really helps. It creates kind of a thin effect so that it's not super gloppy but it takes a long time. It takes a lot of working and it's just getting it to the point where you feel visually happy with it. When hair grows from the horse's neck it's often the same color as the body. So for this gray he's going to have a white overlay at the base of his neck and it's just working in a lot of these layers slowly and carefully and just seeing what looks best. Holding the model at a distance really helps to see where you've laid your color in. And you want to make sure your gradients are nice so that it looks like the black hairs are overlapping the white hairs at the base of the tail. Then as a final step I'm going to take my Windsor and Newton triple zero and I'm going to add some really fine hair detailing on top. So I think that this technique works really well it's just acrylic paint there's nothing fancy you can experiment with pastels you can experiment with oils but this is the best one that works for me using a thin layers of paint and creating the texture as I see in the sculpture. So thank you so much for watching and happy hair painting. 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.