The unicorn outside its house
The unicorn outside its house: a free printable coloring page, from age 6. A little house with a pointed roof, a spiral staircase, a sky dotted with stars.
- Recommended age
- Ages 6 and up · an hour, often over two days
The house, the staircase and the sky
The unicorn sits in the foreground, right at the bottom, eyes closed in two smiling arcs, her mane on one side and her tail on the other, each as wide as the other. Behind her, the house: a pointed roof edged with a scallop of little bumps, an arched dormer with four panes, a rounded door with a heart carved on it and a round handle, two paned windows, a brick chimney capped with a star. To the right, a spiral staircase climbs the wall. The sky is dotted with a dozen stars and four hearts.
The house children draw
This is the house children draw themselves when you ask them for a house: a square, a triangular roof, a door in the middle, a window on each side, a chimney. Here everything is rounded, and the decoration has been added on top — the scallop of the roof, the heart on the door, the outside staircase. It is the spiral staircase that intrigues them most: it climbs, it turns, but you cannot see where it leads. That is the first question children ask in front of this sheet.
Fifteen steps to do one by one
The steps of the staircase can be counted: there are about fifteen, each half a centimetre wide, and they have to be treated one by one for the spiral to show. The panes of the three windows fill in the same way, and the scallop of the roof has some thirty little bumps. It is the number of areas, not their difficulty, that places this sheet at six: an hour of work at least, with a hand that no longer pushes the pencil at random.
Keep the sky almost white
Three groups to treat separately: the house, the unicorn, the sky. Keep the sky almost white, with only the stars and hearts colored, or the small shapes vanish into the blue. For the staircase, one single color laid lightly over every step, then the side of each step gone over a little harder: the spiral starts to turn. A 0.5 mm fineliner makes the window panes easier than a pencil, provided it is tried first on a corner of the sheet.
A word for the grown-up: suggest coloring the door and the windows last, imagining who is inside. A yellow window means somebody is home, a blue one that it is night and everyone is asleep. The choice is tiny, but your child thinks about it for the whole rest of the page.
Coloring pages that go with this one
More pages from the same theme, age or season — the ones you print right after.
