Rachael T (who is the founder of www.mumtobe.com) needed a few unicorn illustrations for her website and for some baby shower cards, T-shirts, nursery prints and other products and I was the lucky one to provide her with the art works.
She needed 3 illustrations altogether: one of a unicorn head surrounded by flowers, a unicorn head on its own and a whole unicorn. I added a fourth image to the bunch just because I couldn’t make up my mind about the arrangement of the flowers.
She showed me a couple of reference images to get an idea about the colours and angles and then I began. Normally I would start with a freehand base and then carry out some computer editing but the required size was quite big (60 x 60 inches for one of the art works) so I had to rethink my methods. I started the whole process in Illustrator. First I made the flowers because those seemed the least challenging to me. I tried to vary the shades and textures to resemble a watercolour-ish effect. I kept the leaves simple to keep the focus on the unicorn.
I started the unicorn with Illustrator as well and managed to sneak in some hand-drawn lines also that I converted into vector images with the help of the program. Then I continued with Photoshop, added several layers and details to achieve the final look.
art from scratch 