Skull Wearing Elaborate Flower Crown Coloring Page

The crown is the reason to print this one. Five wide open blooms with rounded petals and heavily dotted centers run in an unbroken band across the top of the skull, and smaller buds fill the gaps behind them. Long pointed leaves trail down past both temples like ribbons. Under all that the skull itself is drawn in a bold flat style with very few internal lines: a small diamond and a scatter of teardrops on the forehead, a clean jaw, and a full row of square teeth with the gum line ruled straight above them. Be aware before you print that the eye sockets and the nose opening have been filled in solid black rather than left open, so those three shapes are decided for you and cannot be worked on. That constraint actually simplifies the job. With the darkest areas already fixed, you only need to balance the flowers against the pale bone, and the strongest results come from keeping the skull almost white and putting every bright shade into the crown. Marigold orange and deep magenta are the traditional pairing for Day of the Dead flowers. Watercolor pencils suit the big petals well, since there is enough room inside each one to lay a wash and still see the line.