Unicorns are a good subject to paint freehand, because almost nothing about them has to be accurate. Nobody can tell you the horn is the wrong length. That freedom makes a unicorn one of the easier things to attempt if you have never painted an animal before.
To be clear at the outset: there is no unicorn in our range. We make 39 licensed designs — Americana scenes, wildlife, cabins and florals — and none of them is a unicorn. What follows is a straightforward acrylic tutorial you can do on a plain canvas.
What you need
Very little. A pre-primed canvas or canvas panel, a small set of student-grade acrylics, a few brushes and some paper towel.
- Colors. White, a magenta or rose, a violet, a blue, a yellow and a warm brown will cover everything here. You do not need black — mixing your blue and brown gives a deeper, less dead dark than black straight from the pot.
- Brushes. A flat for the background, a medium round or filbert for the body, and a fine liner for the mane, the horn and the eye.
- A canvas panel rather than a stretched canvas if this is practice. They cost a fraction as much and take paint identically.
- Paper towel for wiping the brush, and a plate or piece of glass as a palette.
A note on paint safety: some traditional artist pigments, cadmium among them, carry genuine handling warnings. You do not need any of them for this. Ordinary student and craft acrylics are formulated to be non-toxic and will do everything described below.
Painting a unicorn, step by step
1. Sketch it lightly
Pencil, held loosely, pressing barely at all. You want a horse's head and neck in three-quarter view, the horn coming off the forehead rather than the top of the skull, and a generous S-curve for the mane. Keep the muzzle blunt and the eye large — both read as gentle rather than severe.
Heavy pencil shows through pale paint, so keep the lines faint.
2. Background first
Paint the whole background before you touch the animal, and take it right up over where the outline sits. Working the background around a finished mane is far harder than laying the mane over a dry background.
A soft wash works better than a flat color. Put down two or three related tones — a pale blue, a lilac, a hint of rose — while all of them are wet, and stroke lightly along the joins with a nearly dry brush to soften them. Two or three passes only. More than that and they turn muddy.
Let it dry completely. This takes minutes.
3. Block in the body
White, laid flat, over the whole body and head. Do not try to model it yet. Expect to need two thin coats to get clean opaque white over the background — that is normal, and thin coats cover better than one thick one.
Let it dry, then add the shading. Mix a little of your blue into white for a cool gray and lay it along the underside of the neck, under the jaw, and where the mane falls across the body. Blend the edge of that shadow into the white while both are wet, using the nearly dry brush again. Shadow on a white animal should be a cool tone, not a darker white.
4. The mane and tail
This is the part people enjoy and the part that makes it look finished.
Lay in the broad shape of the mane first as blocks of color — magenta, violet, blue, whatever combination you like. Let it dry. Then take the liner brush and paint individual strands over the top, following the curve of the shape rather than cutting across it. Vary the color as you go and let some strands cross each other.
Fewer, well-placed strands look better than many. Stop before you think you should.
5. The horn
Base it in a pale gold or cream and let it dry. The spiral is a series of short diagonal strokes in a slightly darker tone, all leaning the same way, getting closer together toward the tip. That reads as a twist without you having to draw one.
6. The eye, last
Everything else finished and dry before you start this. Paint the eye shape, let it dry, then put the pupil in. On wet paint the edge spreads and the eye goes soft, which drains the life out of the whole picture.
Leave a small unpainted highlight, or add a dot of white once the eye is dry. That single dot does more than anything else on the canvas.
7. Finishing touches, sparingly
Fine white dots flicked from a stiff brush read as sparkle across the mane and horn. Keep it light. The most common way this painting goes wrong at the end is too much glitter over an otherwise good piece.
Let the finished canvas cure for a couple of weeks before varnishing it, if you varnish it at all. Acrylic feels dry within the hour and keeps hardening for far longer.
If you would rather paint by numbers
We do not make a unicorn design and are not going to pretend otherwise. What we do make, if a horse is what you are really after, is Morning Ride — though it is one of the more demanding designs and not a first canvas.
For a numbered canvas of something specific that we do not stock, the route is a custom canvas made from your own photograph. That works from a photo rather than an illustration, so it suits a real horse, a pet or a place rather than a mythical animal.
If you are new to acrylic generally, the beginner's guide covers setup and order of work, and the color wheel guide is worth reading before you start mixing. You can see the designs we do make in the full catalog.
