Papel Picado with Sugar Skulls Coloring Page

Papel Picado with Sugar Skulls Coloring Page fills the whole sheet with cut paper banners. Four strings of flags hang one above the other from top to bottom, each flag carrying a skull, a flower or a scalloped border punched out of the paper. A free printable papel picado coloring page for ages 4 to 10.

How this coloring page was created

The concept we sent was "A row of papel picado banner flags with cut out sugar skulls, flowers and lacy patterns strung on a line" into Colorin AI, in the cartoon style. Asking for rows stacked down the page instead of one line across is what turns a wide subject into something that fills a tall sheet.

It came back exactly that way: four cords, thirteen flags in total, each one different. Nothing was redrawn.

About this papel picado coloring page

Papel picado is tissue paper cut into patterns and strung across streets, markets and altars. It is the everyday decoration of Mexican celebrations, and at Day of the Dead the cut shapes are usually skulls and flowers.

On this page each flag hangs from a thin cord with two small ties at the ends, and every flag ends in a scalloped or zigzag bottom edge. Seven of them carry a skull, four carry an open flower, and the rest are pattern only.

The skulls are all different. One wears a top hat, one has a moustache, one has heart shaped eyes, one has a bow. Looking for the differences is half of what a child does with this page before they pick up a crayon.

The cut shapes are drawn as outlines, which means a child decides what is paper and what is a hole. That choice is the whole exercise here.

Nothing overlaps and nothing is small. Thirteen separate flags means thirteen stopping points, which is useful for a child who works in short bursts.

Coloring Ideas and Techniques

Real papel picado is one flat colour per flag, and that is the fastest route to a page that looks authentic. Pick four colours and rotate them along each row.

Leave the cut shapes white. The skull and the flower on each flag are meant to be holes in the paper, and colouring them turns the banner into a printed poster instead of a cut one.

If a child wants more to do, the scalloped bottom edges can take a second darker tone. It reads as the shadowed underside of the paper.

Colour the cords a light grey or leave them white. They are the only thing on the page that is not paper.

Print two copies, colour them, cut the flags out along their outlines and string them on real thread. This is the one page in the set that turns into a decoration, and it takes about ten minutes.

Hung across a doorway, a string of these coloured flags does the same job as the real thing at a fraction of the cost, and a child who cut and coloured them will point them out to every visitor for a week.

One practical note before printing: the flags run close to the edge of the sheet at the top and bottom rows. Print at 100 percent rather than fit to page, or the printer will shave the scalloped edges off the outer flags.