Horses are extremely powerful and intelligent creatures, and the thought occurred to me, what would a horse be like if it was carnivorous? It would surely be a dangerous creature to deal with, so what better kind of traveling companion for my unfriendly little Justice?   These sketches served two purposes, the first being simply to familiarize myself with horse anatomy more in general. Second, as my study of what kind of adaptations would have to happen to a horses skull, such as binocular vision and rooting of canine teeth. Predators are almost characterized by binocular vision, allowing them depth perception to judge distances. Also, animals with large canine teeth need firm bone to root those teeth in, thus the largest teeth couldn't be at the front of the mouth, which is much hollowed with nasal passages, but would be set back further in their jaw.

The strange wrinkles on the picture are tracing paper taped over the original underlying sketch. It's a method I picked up from my architecture classes, but it works marvelously well when you're fleshing out a sketch. In this instance being able to sketch flesh on top of the skulls really helped me learn a horse's facial anatomy.  I'll try to find a link to the wonderful book on horse anatomy that I used, I highly recommend it.