Sugar Skull Between Two Maracas Coloring Page

Two maracas stand guard on either side of this calavera, one to the left and one to the right. Each rattle is a fat round gourd on a straight handle, banded with zigzag stripes that cut it into sections. Those sections are the whole point: they break a plain shape into pieces you can treat separately, so a child can learn stripes on this page without anything else going wrong. The skull between them wears a daisy on its forehead with eight blunt petals. Rings of small beads circle both eye sockets, and the sockets themselves are left open and white. A narrow heart marks the nose and a long row of boxed teeth fills the jaw. Everything here is drawn with thick confident lines and a lot of blank paper in between. Try alternating two shades around each maraca so the zigzags read as a spiral rather than a stack. Mexican rattles are usually painted that way. The skull can stay paler than the instruments, which pushes it back a little and makes the page feel staged rather than flat.