Gallop Animation- UPDATED

UPDATE #3:
finally managed to make a decent smooth rolling background, but didn't had time to make the grass in front of the horse. fixed a couple of small glitches on the horse, but the hands still suck. the right one isn't bending properly and i still don't know what's wrong with the left one... and the neck is a mess... oh well.

UPDATE #2:
added colours and made a nice tail and a forelock. after many hours of head banging, i finally managed to put a rolling background, but it's still not perfect and i dunno why! T_T and i still have to find out how to make two different backgrounds rolling at different speeds...

UPDATE #1:
re-lined everything, brand new head, and the outline for the mane. still very soon to risk a tail. and i hate those front legs. XD

--------------------------
that's the starting point for my future great project of making a horse racing animation, with several horses, each with a jockey and good background.
i managed to get the whole thoroughbred stride in only 8 frames, which is good. i'd love to make it faster but because of photoshop's limitations, i had to reduce the number of frames (therefore reducing quality). that totally sucks, but until i get a better program to make gifs at any possible speed, that's the maximum speed that horse will reach. DX
anyway, i won't make the whole thing right away. i'll need to practice the rolling backgrounds. so first i'll make a single horse running rider-less on a nice pasture or something. if it works, then i'll make the real thing.

hope you already like it! comments and criticism always welcome!


media: the usual scheme, first a pivot animation, then a photoshop animation based on pivot's skeletons, then filling up those bones. all with mouse and tablet.
time taken: ugh... the pivot animation took me forever, probably more than 2 hours spread over several weeks. the actual drawing took less than one hour, just getting the skeleton after the pivot screenshots, a little tweaking, done.
reference: many galloping thoroughbred's pictures, and a little help from videos and animations, only for the pivot animation. nothing for the actual drawings.