Unicorn Ideas

I have joined my friends at Running With Paintbrushes and the first assignment I joined in on was Unicorns. We love children's illustration, mythology, fable and fantasy and wanted to tackle something that could be cheesy but could be a lot more. These are sketchbook pages of the earliest stages, that point right after you say "yeah unicorns could be really cool" and then try to prove it - on paper. 

Everything is rough at this point and nothing is finished off. The goal is to blast though a lot of ideas and avoid getting hung up on a bad one (half motorcycle/half unicorn, maybe not). Some early ideas might be a good beginning but you just want to go another way. This is also a great time to go ahead and sketch those things that you know are a ripoff of someone else's idea - put them on paper and get them out of your system.

Some ideas start to feel right or at least worth elaborating on. Sometimes it's as simple as giving yourself a whole page to spread out and fiddle with a little more detail. I can get nervous at this point and wonder if I'm wasting time on a dead end. It helps to clear your mind and just keep sketching and letting things take form. This sketch above felt like it had possibilities but something made me move on.

I was sure I wanted a female figure in the piece and an idea was forming about contrast between a large unicorn and slender girl. How could they interact without one figure overpowering the other?

It can be helpful to square things up and actually look at how things are laid out on your canvas. I wanted to make this piece vertical and needed to see how the subjects fit in that space. Maybe I could use the bare back rider. A completely new idea popped up from trying to fill that vertical space. It wasn't quite right but I liked the unicorn viewed from the front.

 

Which led to this front view. It felt right that the unicorn was large but also delicate somehow in position. I went back to the idea of the girl in front and made it work with her head tucked under his cheek and her foot resting on his hoof (drawing on tracing paper over the unicorn sketch helped me move the girl around and find the best position for her). The vantage is looking down on them slightly and that helped me place the horizon line and rough in a background. When you start to like an idea you want to elaborate on it. Now it was easy to give her a sword, lay in trees and branches and grass and to find a little temple in the water behind.

I now felt like I had a sketch. The drawing isn't even started at his point but I have a framework that I can elaborate on and elements that I can start finding reference for. There is always room for more sketching, ten pages may have brought me farther. Sketching very large on big sheets of newsprint can open up layout ideas. They say a painting is never finished just abandoned. In fact it's a whole process of building up and abandoning, a garden of forking paths.