Skull Surrounded By Blooming Roses And Ivy Coloring Page

Weight is what distinguishes this drawing. The lines are thick and confident with no fine detail anywhere, and the skull is rendered as a few big simple shapes: a broad smooth cranium, two curved brow marks, hollow cheeks and a row of short teeth under a heavy jaw. Eight roses in full bloom bank up behind and around it, each one built from concentric curled petals, and broad serrated ivy leaves cross the foreground on long stems that run down past the chin to the bottom edge. The eye sockets and nose have printed solid black rather than open, which fixes the darkest part of the composition before you start. Because the shapes are large, this is one of the few detailed adult sheets that a confident ten year old can also finish, and it takes markers well without any risk of bleeding two small areas into one. Deep red roses against bone white is the expected pairing and it does look good. A less obvious option is to run the roses through a slow gradient, red at the top of the page shifting to pale pink at the bottom, which gives the flat bold style some depth it does not otherwise have.