Detailed Catrina With a Lace Gown Coloring Page

Detailed Catrina With a Lace Gown Coloring Page draws her full length. A wide hat of roses and feathers sits above a skull face, a lace shawl falls from both shoulders, and a gown of four ruffled tiers spreads to the bottom edge of the page.

How this coloring page was created

We asked for "A detailed catrina in a flowing lace gown with a floral hat, a patterned shawl and fine ruffles" into Colorin AI, in the intricate style. Full length is what the catrina was originally drawn as, and the gown is the part that carries the joke about imported fashion.

The generator gave every tier of the skirt its own pattern rather than repeating one, which is more work to colour and considerably better to look at.

What is in this catrina lace gown coloring page

The hat is wide and heavily trimmed: a band of roses right around the crown, three feathers rising behind and a scalloped brim edged with lace.

Below it the face is a skull with round sockets and a stitched smile, above a ribcage drawn faintly through the neckline of the dress.

A shawl of open lace falls from both shoulders to the elbows, drawn as a mesh of small repeated shapes rather than as solid cloth.

The gown has four tiers, each with its own edging: scallops on the first, a dotted band on the second, a zigzag on the third, and a wide ruffle at the hem.

At the waist sits a cluster of flowers, and both hands hold the skirt out slightly, which is what gives the figure its width at the bottom.

She fills the page from top to bottom with no background at all, the same treatment as the portrait version elsewhere in this set.

Coloring Ideas and Techniques

Pick one colour for the gown and use tone rather than hue to separate the tiers: lightest at the hem, darkest at the bodice. It reads as one dress in the right light.

Leave the lace shawl white. Lace is holes, and colouring it turns the most delicate thing on the page into a blanket.

The roses on the hat should be the only strong colour above the shoulders. Everything else up there is structure.

Colour the flowers at the waist in the same tone as the hat roses. That single repeat ties the top of a very tall drawing to its middle.

Keep the face white and the ribcage barely touched. It is drawn faintly on purpose.

Do the hem ruffle last. It is the widest single band on the page and it is the part that will show if your hand is tired.

Two sittings, split at the waist. The gown alone is close to an hour with pencils.

The original catrina was an etching printed on cheap paper around 1910, and she was only a head in a hat. The full body version came later, in a mural, and the gown was the painter's invention. This page is the descendant of that.

For anyone colouring with markers, print at full size and test the lace on a corner first. The mesh is drawn at about a millimetre and most markers will close it up.