I believe most unicorns depicted in popular culture are white and come with magical rainbow-colored horns. Meet this, a gold/brown unicorn with a flaming red mane and a horn that seems to be a part of a silver armor! Since no one has ever seen a unicorn, these colors can't be wrong, can they?
I did an online search of color pencil artists' renditions of this drawing from Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia book, and yes, most did the unicorn in white. I had meant to do the same - it would have been an exercise in creating the illusion of white. Such a unicorn would probably have entailed using various shades and layers of yellow, pale blues, pale greens and greys to make the animal look white.
But I started with a pale cream around the eyes, and before I knew it, the face was too brown/cream-colored to make it a white horse already. Ooops. So gold/brown this thing came to be.
Oh yes, before I go further, I need to note here that this drawing was done using my tin box of 72 Derwent Coloursoft pencils for a change. After months of using my Prismacolor (set of 150), I found the Derwent pencils nowhere as soft and easy to blend or even lay down as a first color. I wonder why.
Back to this unicorn drawing: Online renditions of this drawing by Rosanes' mostly went with blood-red roses; some had lurid colors on the headgear, like brilliant blue... To be contrarian, I picked blush pink and dusty lavender for the roses for a softer look, and after doing the gold for Anubis (see post here), I made this one an exercise in rendering silver.
The roses: Rosanes' ink shading made the roses a cinch to do. Darker pinks and lavenders went into the lined shadows, with the paler shades of pinks and lavenders on the parts of the blooms facing the light.
The silver armor: From reading Alyona Nickelsen's Colored Pencil Painting Bible (a worthwhile investment if you want to learn the finer points of rendering ice, glass, water, wood, flora/fauna, metal, gems and jewellery!), the tip I picked up was that to convey the illusion of shiny metal, the darkest values and lightest ones have to sit right next to each other, with little or no grading between.
It is really much more complicated than that, for Nickelsen also delves into how to create the reflections of objects on silver. Here, I simplified it by not drawing in any reflections. The unicorn's headgear was assumed to be isolated from any surrounding objects, hence the broad bands of pure, bright white against 90% grey or sheer black on the metal and the horn. I hope it looks believably silver nonetheless.
A horse this majestic could have done with a more generous mane, I thought. And with red being my favourite hair color, I went with that, using pale yellow and my white gel pen for the highlights.
The scattered gems around the unicorn were quickly done. Most of them were done using a jewel tone - a strong green, blue or red - with a dark grey pencil for depth around the edges, and my trusty white gel pen for highlights.
Coloring in the background: Matthew Vaughn (Instagram handle manlycoloring) does awesome backgrounds with his pencils. And from his WIPs, it looks like he does them first. When the colors are done right, backgrounds do make the subject jump out and provide a context for them. Kudos to him!
BUT... they are a lot of work. Matt Vaughn says that because the backgrounds in most coloring books are blank, they are a great canvas for the imagination. True. But it is still a lot of work! And after I have colored in a picture, especially a double-spread one, I'm too pooped to think of filling in that expanse. Matt Vaughn does show the possibilities though.
I am dropping the idea of doing the background for the unicorn, and have moved on to my next picture.
My mum-in-law asked me an existential question the other day: So after you are done coloring this picture, what then? I was floored for a moment. "I don't do anything with them," I replied. "My pictures aren't good enough to sell!" Coloring is an end in itself to me. I take breaks between pictures to draw my own pictures, like I did with Marutaro here, the carnations and the carousel horse. No immediate plans for another!
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