Practical tools that help equine professionals see clearly and teach with confidence.
About Ground Level Equine
Ground Level Equine builds practical tools that help equine professionals see clearly and teach with confidence.
Across more than twenty years in horse-centered environment, one pattern kept surfacing: professionals are trained to know, but rarely trained to see. Interpretation arrives faster than observation, and the horse in front of us disappears behind the horse we expect.
Equine Journaling closes that gap. It uses sketching and structured journaling, not to make art, but to slow the eye down and keep what is observed separate from what is assumed.
About Olga
Olga Surmacheva learned the method before she built it. In 2006 she started carrying a sketchbook to the barn, drawing her own horse not to make pictures but to understand what she was looking at. By 2015 that practice had a name, Impulse Drawing, a program at the intersection of drawing and horsemanship. Over the following decade it grew into Equine Journaling: a structured way of seeing that she now teaches to professionals across the horse world.
PATH Intl. Equine Specialist in Mental Health and Learning (ESMHL). Large Animal Massage Practitioner. Presenter, Horses and Humans Research Foundation and the 2026 ILHA Liberty Festival
Approach
The method stands on two older disciplines - from Nature Journaling it takes the habit of observing and recording in the field, and from Gesture Drawing it takes a way to teach anyone, with no art background, to see movement in a few honest marks. What Equine Journaling adds is the discipline at the center: separating what you see from what you assume.
Equine Journaling does not replace your training. It builds tools that help your training land on what is actually there.