Pinto Pattern Horse Colours | Model Horse Customizing, Drawing & Painting Tutorial

In this video we are going to be discussing pinto patterning in horses. We're going to be analyzing the colors on a visual representation and understanding the rules that go along with them. My hope at the end of this video is that you will be able to identify pinto patterns on real life horses and apply that knowledge base to the equine artistry of your choosing. If you don't already know me, hi my name is Darren and this is DJB Studios. I have been a professional model horse artist since 2017. I specialize in briar customization, original sculpture, and finish work and my mission is to share that with you in hopes to educate, inspire, and entertain. Before we get started I would just like to say all of the tools and supplies used in this video are listed in the description below and on my website at www.djb.com slash customize. These links are affiliate links that help support my studio, artwork, and videos like this. 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That being said, this video will be a baseline for everything you need to know. I also want to preface this that I am not an expert in terms of genetics or any of this. This is all based on my own research and I'm just doing my best to break it down in what I know. So take everything with a grain of salt here, this hopefully will just help you as a point of reference. So these are all of the different patterns that exist. They all have specific names and a set of guidelines that go along with them. So each marking has a kind of rule that they follow in terms of the pattern, how it spreads across the body, where it originates, the location and whatnot. When we're looking at these images we want to consider the horse as a base solid color and then anything that's white is an additional gene on top. We're not talking about markings, we're not talking about a stripe down the face or a white sock, we're talking about broad white that patterns the whole horse. These patterns occur when there actually is a gene present and there's different types of these white genes that exist and they fall into one of the categories of the named pinto patterns. In all of these drawings I have chosen just a solid brown base color. Think of these as being able to be added on to any solid color and if you haven't seen the solid color video already you definitely should check that out, that covers all of those base colors and these are additional genes on top to create your pintips. In this chart I do have all of the pinto patterns, I also have the Appaloosa patterns. We're just going to be going through the pinto patterns in this video. I do have another video on Appaloosa patterns so definitely check that out. Basically we have our Tobiano which is your classic pinto, you can also have Overo, Splash, Sabino and you can see already visually how these are much different. This one's following the top line, this one's following kind of the mid section and underneath, this one is purely following underneath and this one is much more lacy and intricate. We're just going to be focusing on these top four up here and these bottom ones down here. So we do have Rabicano, much more intricate and kind of round, we'll get into that. This is a Tovero which is a term that's loosely used for markings that don't really make sense. We can also get a Medicine Hat which is mostly white here and Manchato is a more unique pattern that's very specific in certain breeds of South American horses. Now there's a lot of anomalies out there and sometimes it can be hard to identify truly what is going on without genetic testing but in the purpose of understanding this visually and understanding this at a basic level we're just going to go through these the best that we can. Obviously looking at real horse reference you're going to see lots of variants here. Sometimes weird things go outside of the rules that we don't fully understand and there's constantly new research being done but horses are pretty predictable in their color and their patterning so these rules do apply to the majority. Something to consider when looking at anything with white markings is that your skin of your horse is typically going to be gray on its base color unless it's a double dilute and it has pink skin or it's a champagne and it has mottled skin. Any skin underneath white markings is going to be pink. Now this doesn't apply to a gray horse, a gray horse does have gray skin but a white marking is different and it's kind of this depigmentation of the hair and also the skin. We notice this intensely on the facial markings because the muzzle will also be pink just because that skin is pink because it's depigmented. So this is the image of the horse, here's your brown base color, the white is over top of that. This would be the skin example where we have the gray skin under the brown color and then the pink skin under the white color. Something else that comes up a lot in terms of white markings in general is your hoof. Your solid colored hoof is going to give a kind of a gray tone hoof color typically. When you add a marking it also depigments the hoof so you'll get kind of a shell color and then if you have a marking that's crossing over or leaving gaps out you can have some of that gray color but also some of that shell color which is really interesting. The same goes for the pigmentation of the eye. Here's your solid horse, you have gray skin, you would have a brown eye unless it's carrying a splash gene that can give a blue eye. When we add this white marking this is depigmenting the skin so the skin is going to be pink under here which means the is going to be pink. If we cover the eye or we get too close to the eye in a lot of these paint horses you can get a blue eye where the skin around the eye is also pink and then the eye will be blue in color. Sometimes you can have a pinto horse that has this marking and then a blue eye. It doesn't necessarily have to cross but if it does cross it's almost always blue. Sometimes on a splash horse it can have no white markings and just a blue eye. Here's some more about the eyes so you would have that blue eye with the pink skin. Sometimes in pinto horses you can get eyeliner which is like this black outline that goes around the eye and the eye itself will still be blue. Sometimes if the marking crosses over the eye you can get a heterochromia eye which is like two tones. The white marking really differentiates the pigmentation of everything in its path and then this would be example of a splash horse. It can carry the gene but not necessarily have white and still express a blue eye. We're going to start with tobiano. So this is a classic tobiano. I find this color to be the easiest to identify. It's just got the most obvious landmarks and rules or guidelines to go by. If you can't quite remember how this works I find that it's easy to remember tobiano as top. So when I say that that is because this marking will always cross the top line. So a tobiano horse will have this patch that will cross over the shoulders or over the hindquarters in some way. The legs will also always be solid white and the face may or may not have a marking. If we think of this horse as a solid color we're laying that white marking over top. It's going to originate at kind of the legs and at the top line. So if we go into this progression this would be your minimal expression, more of a minimal expression, classic, classic, and these are your extreme expressions. So this horse could be considered a tobiano. You wouldn't know this just by looking at it but it has tall socks so they will always have white legs. They can't have a solid leg and these markings must be tall. That's kind of the other indicator that this would be a paint horse and not just a regular horse because a regular horse can have a white marking on the foot but those socks would be kind of just at the halfway point. But anything that crosses the hocks or crosses the knees gets into the pinto territory because these genes originate kind of at the legs. This horse is a carrier of the tobiano gene even though he's not expressing a ton of that color. As things get a little more white you can have these just little patches of color but they're kind of going to want to line up along the hind quarters and along the shoulder. So here's your classic expression. This is how they're commonly found where there's a large patch over the shoulder, a large patch over the hind quarters, and it can affect the tail if that pigmentation is touching the tail and the pigmentation is touching the mane. So anything on the neck line that is in contact with the mane is going to create white mane hairs and same with the tail. In tobianos we get this two-toned tail though as well where the top of the tail is white and then the bottom of the tail is this solid color. You can also have it vice versa if the horse is a kind of a solid color and there's no white touching the base of the tail. The tip of the tail can turn white and the face marking can vary. A lot of the time it is a more softer marking, less dramatic, but some of them can have really crazy markings that cover majority of the face and head. Here's another example. This one would be tobiano too because this marking is crossing the top line. We have a patch where it's not touching and that can happen. There's kind of a classic expression where there's almost like saddle looking patch that can occur up there. We often see the original base color peeking through in the flank area and around the head. So this would also be tobiano. It's just a more advanced version and it is quite common to see these large circular patches of solid color peeking through on those larger white spots as well. And this is a more extreme variation where the whole horse is white there's just going to be this little piece of the ears peeking through and that's kind of the last place that gets covered by tobiano. Sometimes they'll also have a little piece in here and this is also called medicine hat. And once again we have like the skin in the groin is also affected by that pigmentation so in this case the genitalia would be pink. The muzzle is very very pink because these are areas that don't have any hairs so they don't show white they just show that skin color and those hooves are also going to be shell colored in this case. This is an example of a homozygous tobiano. That's genetically where the gene is dominant so therefore if this was a stallion he would pass the tobiano trait 100% to his offspring. And these little spots are called ink spots or cat tracks. They show up in the pinto pattern which can sometimes be confused with Appaloosa but it's not it is just these spots occurring. They often have kind of mapping around the edges and this can happen really intensely on the legs as well. Belton spotting is kind of a crazy phenomenon. These spots would just be like more dramatic and clustered. The belton spotting does uniformly cover all of the white really covering the legs really covering the face and everything. You can also have a horse that looks like this that has those ink spots in the legs. When they come in contact with the hooves they're called ermine spots and so you can see that wherever they make contact with the hoof you're gonna have this dark gray color occur with the solid color and then you can have this shell colored striping on the white marking. Sometimes you can have a stripe in the hoof too just randomly and that's either some depigmentation or some trait that's showing up but it does generally follow this rule and we can get these little spots on the nose as well which a lot of people call kissy spots because they're kissable. The belton spotting and the homozygous spotting is really interesting and can look a little like an Appaloosa but only happens in Tobiano can be of varying degrees. You can have like one of these one or two of these spots or you can have a lot of these spots. I also want to touch on mapping so this horse has mapping around these spots and that is where there's a mixture of the solid colored hairs and the white colored hairs kind of converge and make a slightly lighter shade of color around any of the edge of the markings. This is called mapping. The next color we're going to dive into is overo. This is the second most common that you will find and it's basically Tobiano and overo are the two main pinto markings. Overo, I like the acronym of over. That is over the body, across the side of the body. So these markings originate around the mid line of the horse. They can cover underneath the belly but they will not cross the top line. They avoid the top line entirely so these horses will have solid manes and tails and often solid legs. Sometimes they can have markings on the legs as well but they'll often be shorter or smaller and not cross the hocks and the knees. They tend to have more dramatic face markings that are a little more patchy and big and often they have a blue eye. Tobiano doesn't generally have blue eyes in the classic expressions. Sometimes they do but in overo you will see that blue eye way more often than in Tobiano which is kind of interesting. These markings are kind of more random in a sense that they will be big blotchy splotches that occur and they'll just be on the center of the horse. So here's your minimal expression where there's not a lot of white happening. This is a little more dramatic. This starts to become even more dramatic which this also can be referred to as frame overo and then you can have these really extreme cases where there's a ton of white happening on the body of the horse. So this is your super minimal kind of starting point and these markings are going to originate at the belly and this could be confused with Sabino in a sense but Sabino would have white legs so overos don't have to have white legs. As we expand those spots we get into our more classic chunky expression where these markings will be quite rigid on the edges and quite chunky and large in size. Those markings can start to blend together to create larger markings and patches that go across the horse and so here we see that this horse has a couple markings happening on the hind legs but not on the front legs and we get this really dramatic blanket face marking. We are framing with the solid color that's kind of where the term frame comes from because this white marking makes that brown color look like a frame around it. Overo can also be very intricate you can have those more chunky expressions and you can have more of a lacy expression and this is where you get a lot of really fine detailing individual herring and really a lacy edge and this can be very dramatic. Here's another example where this is just covering kind of the side of the body and you're getting that marking kind of cross over the eye and you're getting a very intense pink muzzle and so this guy is a more extreme version of the Overo where he's skipped the leg down here. He would have still like solid color kind of across the top line here it's just like very minimal so you can't quite see it from the side and the marking can cross the neck to like touch the mane and color the mane in some cases but it is leaving the tail alone and it's leaving this top line alone and so that white crossing over the eye is giving him a blue eye. Then we have splash so splash is a unique color where the horse looks like it is splashed or dipped into white paint and that is where the marking is predominantly on the underside of the horse so it originates at the leg it also originates in the face so the facial marking is often an indicator of this color it'll often have those white legs and then the varying degrees of intensity will differentiate how high this kind of underbelly marking travels. You have your more minimal expression, your classic expression, more of a full example and then extreme variations of this. In a minimal splash horse actually this horse would be solid with a blue eye that could be considered as splash some of them just have bald faces and carry the splash gene but a lot of the times they will have these really tall white markings and these are taller than in say Tobiano. The face marking is also often a bald face marking you won't really see kissy spots or anything crazy it'll just be a solid white head and will make a blue eye. The markings on the legs will be very tall in a sense where they go past the hocks and the knees and are very very dramatic and it will always be all four legs. Some splash horses will also have a white tail either kind of on the bottom or like all the way up so it's like the whole thing is being dipped in paint. This is your classic expression of that where we're seeing this white marking just along the bottom of the horse and the top line is left solid, blue eye, all four legs are white and this is just furthering that to the point where there's just a little bit of color on the top line and if the splash goes too high up and over the ears they can be deaf. This is like a known thing in other animals as well is that you don't want that white modifier depigmenting the ears because they can have hearing issues. Then we have Sabino. Now Sabino is its own really crazy color pattern that exists. I personally don't fully understand Sabino. I don't think anybody does. Apparently there's a ton of genes that determine this as a pinto pattern and there's a ton of variation with this and they can have multiple genes of the Sabino which intensifies the Sabino so we don't need to get into all of that. We visually just have to understand what this looks like and so these are horses where the underside and the legs and the face similarly to splash are covered but this originates at the belly so the markings will start on the belly, they'll start on the legs and they will have kind of a more dramatic face marking. The white will cross the eye a lot of the time but the eye will remain brown. So here's some of those examples. You have your minimal expression, a lacy pattern. You can have Sabinos with a bunch of body roning and laciness happening. You can have extreme versions of this and then you can have a solid white Sabino as well. So here is your minimal expression. So your leg markings are going to be very tall. The markings will start on the belly. This could be confused with Overo but the legs are your indicators in that case. Here's your more intense expression where those markings are coming up the underbelly of the horse and kind of going across. They can be really dramatic and intricate in what they look like. Here you start to see body roning as well so these can have very dramatic roning patterns that leaves out portions of the dark solid color and intermixes with the mane but once again your eye is brown. Even though the skin is pink and these markings originate at the legs underneath the horse on the belly and create lots of lacy crazy patterns. And then your solid white version can occur sometimes where the whole horse is technically Sabino. You would have the brown eye with the pink skin and this is just a very intense version of Sabino to the point where it's diluted down to white. And sometimes it can be very hard to differentiate these colors. I personally use the term Tovero for these horses where they are both Tobiano and Overo. You just aren't sure which one this would be. This is based off of an image that I found online of a real horse where this was the exact pattern. So you have the ears peeking out, you have a blue eye happening, the marking of the white crosses the top line intensively and creates this big classic Tobiano marking but then on the legs we have two solid legs which would indicate Overo. A lot of color geneticists will just say Overo. It gets a little complicated and there are moments where things cross the top line when they're not supposed to. This is a medicine hat. This is just a very extreme version of Pinto where only the tops of the ears and the forelock as well as a flank spot or not occurs. And this is a specific kind of Pinto that was very sought after. Due to the rarity of this color it was believed to have supernatural protection by the indigenous people of the Native American culture. The healer of the tribe such as the medicine man would often ride these horses into battle so they would not be wounded. Well that's the term medicine hat. Rabicano originates kind of on the underside of the horse and in the flank. So it actually starts in the flank and you can have just a couple hairs in the flank here and then it will extend out and it can go across majority of the body but it kind of remains at the belly here and sometimes it can create these almost lines of just clusters of white hairs. You will often have white legs with this and some sort of facial marking and a skunk tail which is where the white hairs congregate at the top of the tail and create almost like a So this is following the hair growth pattern. This is congregating at the flank and the more white that you see is just the amount of hairs that exist. So this is common in Arabian horses actually and there's some quarter horse lines that carry this. Now your Manchato is an interesting pattern where it is almost like a reverse frame. So this is a very rare pattern that exists in certain South American horse breeds. It's still being understood and discovered. There's not very many horses with it. It kind of looks like a mixture of Appaloosa and Pinto together kind of and it doesn't follow any of the rules of our previous markings. So the best description of this is that the white is on the top line and the underside. So it's framing the solid color. Generally these markings originate on the belly and they can be kind of in the groin and underneath the tail so the tail will be white and affected and then the white carries across the top line and will affect the mane and the upper half of the horse. This can be also really lacy and intricate and cover the whole body. You also kind of want to pay attention to the feel of the marking. So Tobiano horses will often have this kind of round shape occurring where the marking is large circles missing out of the edge of it. Whereas Overo is a little more random and jagged but then can get super lacy in certain cases. Splash is a very defined edge that kind of doesn't have a ton of form to it. And then something like a Manchato is weirdly shaped but then also has like Appaloosa looking spots at the same time. So the feel of the marking can also identify the pattern. So now if we go back to our pattern chart now that you understand your patterns a little bit better. So your Tobiano is top over the top line shoulder patch over the top line hindquarter patch originates at the legs, may or may not have a face marking, doesn't always have a blue eye. Overo is over the body frame Overo of the solid color where the legs may or may not have white. So the marking originates at the center line of the horse and under the belly. Usually the face marking is more dramatic. Splash is your horse dipped in white paint where the marking originates at the legs, at the head, and at the underside. Sabino is where it originates at the head, the legs, and under the belly but creates this more lacy intricate patterning and does not have a blue eye. Your Rabicano is where you originate at the flank and the belly at the top of the tail and the legs. Tovero is where you have a mix of over the top line excluding the legs potentially being confusing in terms of Overo versus Tobiano. Medicine Hat is where the marking covers the whole horse leaving a portion of color around the ears, the forelock, and the flank. And Manchato is where you frame that solid color with white so the marking originates on the top line and the underbelly. If you'd like to see more of these patterns in the real horse world, I have the full extended version of this video available on Patreon that further explains and dissects some real reference images if you're interested. Those are all of the Pinto horse patterns. There are definitely anomalies and there's variance. Of course I hope that this gave you at least a baseline of understanding and you can further identify your own Pintos now out in the wild. Thank you so much for watching. As always, it's an honor and a privilege to spend this time with you. If you'd like this video, be sure to give it a like and leave a comment below. 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