Family Making Sugar Skulls Coloring Page

Family Making Sugar Skulls Coloring Page shows the part of the holiday that happens in a kitchen. Four people stand around a table piping icing onto sugar skulls, three finished ones sit at the front, and shelves of moulds and bowls fill the wall behind them.

How this coloring page was created

The concept we sent was "A family at a table decorating sugar skulls with piping bags and flowers, bowls and moulds around them" into Colorin AI, in the storybook style. Standing the family around a table and putting the shelves behind them is what stacks a wide scene into the height of a page.

The three finished skulls along the front edge of the table came back with the drawing. They give the page its clearest shapes and its easiest starting point.

This making sugar skulls coloring page features

Real sugar skulls are made in a mould from sugar, water and a little meringue powder, left to dry overnight and then decorated with coloured icing. Families make them in batches, and the name of the person being remembered is piped across the forehead.

On this page all four people hold piping bags. Two adults stand at the back, a girl works at the left and a boy at the right, and each has a skull in front of them at a different stage of decoration.

The three finished skulls in the front row are the most detailed objects on the sheet: one with heart eyes, one with flower eyes, one with a diamond on the forehead.

Behind, two shelves hold plain undecorated skulls, a mixing bowl and a sunflower in a jar, drawn lightly so they read as a background.

Everyone is smiling and nobody is drawn as a skeleton, which makes this the most ordinary scene in the collection and a useful counterweight to the rest.

Coloring Ideas and Techniques

Colour the three front skulls first and brightest. They are the subject of the page, and once they are done the rest can stay quiet.

Give the four people plain clothes in soft colours. If the aprons and shirts are as bright as the icing, the skulls stop being the point.

The shelf behind wants the lightest touch on the page: a pale wood tone and nothing else. Anything stronger pulls the eye to the back wall.

Leave the undecorated skulls on the shelf white. The contrast with the finished ones in front is the story the drawing is telling.

Icing colours are traditionally hot pink, orange, purple and lime. Using those four and nothing else gives the page an authenticity that a free choice of colours will not.

If you are making real sugar skulls at home this year, colour this page the night before with the colours you plan to use. It works surprisingly well as a plan.

The mould is worth mentioning while a child colours: the skulls on the shelf behind are the plain ones straight out of it, and the ones on the table are the same object after decoration. Pointing that out turns a busy background into the before and after of the whole scene.

For a classroom this page works as the illustration for an activity rather than as the activity itself. Colour it first, make the real ones second, and the drawing stops being a picture and becomes instructions.