Catrina Zentangle Coloring Page

Catrina Zentangle Coloring Page fills the page edge to edge with pattern. The catrina's face and wide hat sit in the middle, and every space around them, the background included, is packed with repeating waves, scallops and fine line work.

How this coloring page was created

The concept we sent was "A catrina face and hat filled and framed with intricate repeating zentangle patterns" into Colorin AI, in the zentangle style. This is the only page in the collection where the background carries as much pattern as the subject, which is what the zentangle style asks for.

The generator patterned the background in long curved bands radiating out from the figure, and that is what keeps the eye moving toward the face rather than away from it.

What is in this catrina zentangle coloring page

The face is painted rather than bone: petals ringing both eyes, a heart nose, stitch marks at the mouth and a small crown pattern on the forehead.

Long wavy hair falls on both sides, drawn as broad strands with fine lines running along their length.

The hat is wide and heavily patterned, with a band of roses across the crown and a brim filled with scallops, waves and rows of dots.

Below the chin sits a beaded collar of three rows above a bodice of repeating shapes.

The background is not empty anywhere. Curved bands of pattern radiate outward from behind the hat to all four edges of the page.

Because everything is patterned, the only way the face reads at all is that its patterns are smaller and finer than the ones around it.

Coloring Ideas and Techniques

Leave the background white or give it the palest possible tone. Coloured strongly it swallows the figure completely, which is the one way to ruin this page.

Colour the hat in two tones and the hair in one. Those two decisions carry most of the drawing.

The roses on the hat band are the only place for a bright colour, and they are what tells the eye where the top of the figure is.

Keep the face white with only the eye rings and the stitches coloured, exactly as on the other painted faces in this set.

If you want the strongest possible result, colour only the figure and leave the entire background untouched. The contrast does more than any palette will.

Work outward from the face. On a page with no empty space, the middle is the only place where a mistake cannot be hidden.

This is the longest of the four zentangle pages here, and the one where a limited palette matters most.

There are four catrinas across this collection and this is the last of them. The kawaii one is a face and a flower crown, the cartoon one wears a hat and holds a fan, the intricate one is a portrait, and this one is the same woman dissolved into pattern.

For anyone who finds a fully patterned page overwhelming, cover everything below the chin with a sheet of paper and colour only the hat and the face. It is a complete drawing on its own and takes a third of the time.

Fineliners and a single grey pencil is also a legitimate way to finish this page. On zentangle work, monochrome is a choice rather than a shortcut.