Still got a few of these processes lying around! Painted this unicorn about a year ago now, it’s still one of my favs.
 
As always, these are little step by step ramblings of how I went about painting and how everything came together. If anyone has any questions or clarifications on a stage, please ask! Also - there is no right or wrong way to paint! This is just how I created this particular piece - I hope it helps in some way.
 
1 - Started in greyscale as had no idea for colours and didn’t want to get too bogged down with them yet anyway. Just getting an idea of a pose for my horse.
 
2 - Tweaked the angle and head for dynamism. Going for a curved ground to help portray the feeling of speed. Again, still just using greyscale and a hard round brush.
 
3 - Starting to play with colours. Introduced subtle colours using a gradient overlay layer for the background and decided on a nice blue ‘essence’ for the unicorn. I want some of the bones showing through so painted in some rough ideas for ribs.
 
4 - Played a bit more with the greens, using soft smoke and cloud brushes to build up a misty atmosphere. Hard brush for rocks on the ground. Thinking of lighting for the horse - green ambient from the surroundings showing on the top part with a blue glow showing on the underside as he would be lit up from his glowing hooves.
 
5 - Not undead enough so started researching pictures of horse muscles and bones (lovely!) so I can build him up from scratch. I actually did a skeleton layer and a rough muscle layer which was a really good exercise.
 
6 - This is where the bulk of the work is - building up detail. The background particle effects are really simple but add in so much! Use several different layers - each one you can blur differently - manually, using a radial blur or a motion blur, and different intensities. It’s fun to play with these settings to see what effects you can create.
 
7 - Finalize detailing. Brightened the piece and added white at the lightest part of the blue parts to make them really glow.