Appaloosa Horse Colours | Model Horse Customizing, Drawing & Painting Tutorial

In this video we are going to be discussing the specific patterning and traits that occur in Appaloosa horses. Appaloosas happen to be my favorite pattern to replicate in equine artistry and I'm so excited to share my knowledge with you in hopes that you can better understand and identify Appaloosa horses in the real world and apply those skills to your own equine artistry. 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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There I dive a little more into the weeds if you're really serious about understanding all of this and 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 by any means this is just my own personal research and I'm doing my best and I'm learning things all the time but I do try to keep this information as correct as possible. If there's any errors or flaws that you see like I'm not a geneticist and this is for the purpose of reference. The Appaloosa pattern is just a white modifier that is applied to your base color and then the Appaloosa gene is layered on top and so it is a specific gene that brings along traits but also the coat pattern. I've chosen to color this horse a brown color and that is your base color but that color could be any color of your choosing. I have a whole video on solid horse colors and you can check that out and then you can add the Appaloosa gene to any of those. What is Appaloosa? It is the spot pattern. All of these patterns originate from the hindquarters. We get very mottled skin which is from all of these spots so throughout the whole horse's body and it'll show up on the muzzle and around the eye and in the groin is that you'll have gray skin but it'll have these pink kind of splotchy little mottled bits intermixed. Appaloosa horses are also known to have really poor hair so they'll have a really stubby short mane and a really stubby short tail. This can be called a rat tail and it's very common in the breed. The pattern itself though can be applied to other horse breeds so you can have sport horses, you can have stock horses, and different kinds of horses that display Appaloosa without those traits of no hair. So we are trying to breed Appaloosas to have nicer hair but the foundational lines and the true Appaloosa breed they don't have a lot of hair which is very sad because they're very beautiful. Along with that mottled skin that will give you a very stripy hoof so regardless of your white marking you're just going to see a lot of striping. The color is very spotted and roaned and therefore the skin reacts in that way. A lot of Appaloosa horses are also wall-eyed which is where you see the eye white or the sclera showing through. This is really common on Appaloosas who have this mottled skin and then you'll have this really expressive eye because they show a lot of eye white. So any of these spots on this white pattern are going to be basically holes out of this white pattern that showcase the original base color. Sometimes they can also have mapping which is the mixture of white and base colored hairs coming together. This can be really prominent on any Appaloosa or they can just have a solid edged spot and sometimes they can have other colors of spots so if this was like a brown horse you can sometimes have random black spots happening on top and you can have different colored spots happening on the body. So there is some variance there I'll demonstrate that in real images later in this video. You can actually have an Appaloosa that occurs solid. You can have a solid paint horse too that carries the jean doesn't display any of the coat pattern. In Appaloosa you would still have that mottled skin you might have like a spot or two happening on the body so it can be very very minimal and it can be very very extreme. So when we're looking at this from our minimal blanket, blanket, extended blanket, semi-leopard, leopard these are just the white marking expanding over the entire horse. So sometimes when we look at a Appaloosa we think white horse with brown spots but it actually is a brown horse with leopard complex where the entire horse is covered in white leaving spots across the entire body whereas your blanket is more obviously just a white patch on the hindquarter. So here's your very minimal expression this horse could have a spot or two it could grow a spot or two. Appaloosas change with age they change with each shed so their spot pattern is not always the same. So this horse has mottled skin stripy hooves therefore we carry the Appaloosa jean. Here's your minimal blanket this is where we just have a little bit of white hairs peeking through and this can be as simple as like a few white hairs to just a few sections of hair but it's a very minimal expression of the color. Here's your blanket Appaloosa this is classic so this covers the hindquarters leaving out spots of that solid color underneath as spots across the blanket and the top of the tail is affected as well because that white is converging with the tail hairs. This is an extended blanket so that just further extends across the back of the horse and what I find interesting is this is your kind of classic top of the hindquarter example down in here you often see white patterning wanting to occur. So on this example it wouldn't be uncommon to see a patch of white down here as well so it kind of wants to originate at this kind of belly whorl point and the hindquarters and then it will extend across the back and up. You can have any kind of face marking as well you could have a couple socks here generally they would be low socks it can either just be specific to the hindquarter or it can be kind of across the whole body and you could have patches of white happening on the edge of the blanket as well that's not uncommon. This is your semi leopard when I think semi leopard I just think that there is pieces of the solid color peeking through generally you'll see a spot in the flank and a spot in the armpit and this may or may not converge down the legs you'll still see spotting in the leg markings they're not always solid markings sometimes they are these more appaloosa based markings you'll have large markings on the face which can or cannot have spots as well it's also not uncommon to see some of the mane being more striped where you have white and the solid color kind of intermixing to create a two-toned hair and then when this completely covers the entire body that is considered a leopard appaloosa and you'll see varying degrees of shape and sizes of spots that cover the entire horse but basically that is just the white blanketing the whole horse and leaving some of these body colored spots to peek through so here's another example of leopard this is more intense where you have a lot more spots kind of intermixing together I find this really interesting because you'll often have spots kind of morphing together to create like clusters this is very very common in the pattern and especially when you have more spots happening like they start to just kind of merge together but you can also have patterns that have very few spots so this would be a leopard as well it's mostly white it's not diluted and it's not depigmented it's just appaloosa so it's the appaloosa white where the skin is still gray with mottling and then you're gonna have a couple of those solid colored spots covering the body in random places but it's obviously much less dramatic you can also have an appaloosa with no spots because why not make it more confusing these patterns will always originate on the hindquarters they can extend across the body further but it is the appaloosa gene you have your striped hooves you have your mottled skin you just don't see any spots in the hindquarters this is called snowcap once again that marking is affecting the tail and creating the top of that to be white this is a frost appaloosa originating at the hindquarter and across the top line you can have this groaning pattern occur where you can have some spots or no spots and it's just this light dusting of white hairs across the once again what makes this appaloosa there are the other genes of the mottled skin the striped hooves you would have a lot of this roaning converge into the top of the mane and the top of the tail as well and then this is an example of a varnish roan appaloosa this is very very classic appaloosa where if you look up pictures of these horses in real life it's a very clear pattern where the roaning is across the shoulder it's kind of across the belly but it leaves the legs out it'll kind of fade the middle of the legs but then be really dark across the top of the hooves the head will start to be roaned out but it'll have these really dark patches around the ears and the cheekbones and the tops of the legs and the flank sometimes the shoulder where there's like dark hair happening and then the hindquarters can have a blanket pattern or not they can have spots or not so it's just where the body is really roaning out and this is actually an age defiant color so as this horse ages it could look like this when it's three or four and then as it ages it can turn solid white and have a few random spots so to the point where you don't see this blanket is even there anymore it's just a solid white horse but if you were to like shave it down like this skin would be pink this roaning gene is really interesting and really dynamic and my best advice for this particular color is to look up real life reference of it because it's very hard to replicate in drawings but it is like a very heavily roaned color this is considered a few spot Appaloosa this is another strange phenomenon that can happen you have these big blotchy patches of solid color that peek through on the knees on the hocks above the hooves around the flank around the girth on the chest and underneath the neck and across the face and it's very specific to Appaloosa so another one to really look into in your own time and these body spots will be few and far between so you'll have just like a few random spots but like these patches of color are very interesting and very specific to Appaloosa and they don't really follow the rules of other patterns so this is very very unique you have an intermixing of these white hairs in the mane and the tail as well between these two really good to look into real life reference here's your solid white Appaloosa a no spot Appaloosa you can have one spot somewhere even but this is potentially a horse that's older in its age and has roaned out if it had the roaning gene as well as the Appaloosa gene so now it's just solid white or maybe it just didn't have any spots because sometimes they don't still has the mottled skin still is the stripy hooves sometimes you can see a blue eye in Appaloosa it's not as common though it is more common for them to just have that brown eye that they'll have that really prominent eye white a snowflake Appaloosa is almost opposite of what we've just been talking about where this is a solid horse with white spots this can be really fine and minimal it can be a little more dramatic or can be really intense this is a little more rare of a color it's almost like a roaning but with actual spots this is the very rare peacock Appaloosa this has happened on a few horses that exist out there and it's very unique and very specific where your spots normally if they were haloed would be haloed with a dark color these guys are haloed with a white so the spots almost look like a disease on them it's really quite interesting and your hindquarter spots are going to be not mapped they're going to be just regular like would normally be and then your mid body spots are going to be haloed in white and they usually are across the whole horse very very striking and very prominent another great one to look up you can also have a Pintaloosa so I do have a video on Pinto horses if you combine a horse of an Appaloosa gene and a Pinto gene you can get a Pintaloosa you generally don't see super tall socks or large patches of white outside of the Appaloosa blanket but it'll be around the hindquarter or kind of on the mid section but when you have this really obvious patch of Tobiano marking as well as an Appaloosa blanket that would be your Pintaloosa both of these white modifiers are showing on the same horse so all of these butt spots are just spots of solid color peeking through but then we also have additional spots of a darker color over top of those which is really interesting so that can happen where you can have two tones of spots which is easier to see in real life examples as well and this is another example of Pintaloosa where you have more dramatic white marking happening but you still have Appaloosa spots occurring on the hindquarters you have a small solid blank patch and the head is peeking through so it can really vary in how it expresses so here's an example of the aging process in Appaloosa your young foal might be born really really brown really really dark he'll start to fade as he ages to the point where he'll almost be solid white and the only differentiating factor of this being an Appaloosa and not just a solid white horse would be your Appaloosa traits so you can see he was born with this white sock on this foot is like more shell colored than the rest just based on that marking and so if you shaved these horses down they would look really interesting you would see the outline of that hindquarter blanket and those spots may or may not change as he ages as well the spots are known to change with Appaloosa horses where they can obtain more or lose some or vary in the duration of their life Appaloosa in mules actually is a little bit different than in horses you will see these way bigger patches of color and they'll often be different colors so if the body color is this kind of mid-range brown those spots are really really dark on top and then you get weird patching of random white mules kind of throw all the rules out the window there's some that have really wild patterning there's so many variants here too and this is another great thing to look up and just observe how different they are in terms of the now in all of these patterns I want to emphasize as well that the hair growth plays a factor in the Appaloosa spot so we touch on like the whole pattern and all of that in in my hair growth video these spots yeah are going to follow the hair growth pattern so they're going to go down the shoulder across the body they're going to change direction in the flank and go over the hindquarters what we need to know about Appaloosa is that some of these spots will converge with each other they're also going to be specifically larger on the hindquarters they're going to kind of be a mid-range on the shoulder and the smallest at the belly that seems to be the pattern that comes across on most Appaloosa horses sometimes they can be more oblong and more almond shaped but once again you're going to have larger on the hindquarters kind of mid-range on the shoulder and the smallest across the belly even when you have really fine spots happening they're still following the hair growth still larger on the hindquarters the smallest on the belly and mid-range on the shoulder you can also have really round shaped spots that is something to pay attention to and look up lots of different reference because that will really really help you if you'd like to know more about this topic I do have the full length version of this video available on my patreon we go through a bunch of real horse images in that session as always it's been an honor and a privilege thank you so much for watching if you liked this video be sure to leave a comment below subscribe to my channel if you want to see more and I will see you guys in the next one bye