Floral Procession - Forest Unicorn

Floral Procession won First Place in Fantasy at Seattle Worldcon 2025. https://seattlein2025.org/ Painted in Procreate.

This is a personal piece. While painting it, I was dissatisfied multiple times with the 'final' result. Better reference and my now refined process resulted in this finished piece.

I first made a collage of reference and then sketched story and composition ideas on top.

References.

Value studies before any color work begins. The sketch bottom right is how I break down light and shadow on a horse's body.

The horse's head and body were put together in Photoshop. It borked the anatomy so I went in and fixed it :P