Easter Parade With Fancy Bonnets And Flowers Coloring Page

Three figures stand shoulder to shoulder across this page, each in a wide brimmed bonnet heaped with blossoms. Two of them wear tall rabbit ears rising from behind the brim; the third has traded the ears for an even larger bank of flowers. All three have long wavy hair falling past the shoulder, a beaded collar at the throat, and a bouquet held in both hands, with ribbons trailing from two of them. Big open blooms run along the bottom edge, and the space behind their heads is dusted with small pale flowers.

Those background blossoms are drawn deliberately faint and will print lighter than everything else. Leave them alone or keep them very pale, or they will crowd forward past the figures.

The bonnets are where the detail lives. Dozens of separate petals, each one closed, which makes them slow and forgiving at the same time.

The Easter bonnet parade on Fifth Avenue grew out of churchgoers strolling between services in the 1870s. Irving Berlin wrote the song in 1933 and fixed the custom in everyone's memory long after the actual promenade had faded.