Bouquet colouring page

Seven round flowers with wide petals, their stems bundled and tied with a broad ribbon bow.

Seven flowers stand together at the top of this sheet, each with a circular centre and a ring of wide rounded petals around it. A few more petals show behind them without a centre of their own, which is what makes the bunch look full rather than flat. Below the heads, the stems run down as long straight lanes, gathered into a bundle and tied with a broad ribbon whose bow has two loops, two tails and a square knot in the middle. Under the bow the stems continue and splay slightly apart at the bottom, cut to different lengths.

The seven centres are the anchor of the whole drawing. They are the only circles on the page, they are all the same size, and giving them all one colour is the single decision that makes seven separate flowers read as one bouquet. Doing that first also gives every petal ring a fixed point to work outward from, which is easier than arriving at the centres last.

The petals are wide, closed and forgiving. Because each flower has five or six of them, a flower can take one colour, or alternating petals of two colours, or a graded set from light at the tip to deep at the base. Mixing those approaches across the seven flowers is what makes a bunch look picked rather than printed, and there is no way to do it wrong.

The stems are the quietest part and the easiest to rush. They are long parallel lanes and a single stroke fills each one, but if they all get exactly the same green the bundle turns into a solid block. Two or three greens, distributed at random down the bundle, keeps them reading as separate stems, and it takes no longer.

The bow is the most detailed object here. It has a knot, two loops that curve away from it and two tails that hang down, each of those five parts closed and separately outlined. Colouring the knot a shade darker than the loops makes the bow look tied rather than drawn, and the tails can be lighter still, since they are the parts hanging free.

There is nothing on this sheet that has to be any particular colour, and a bouquet is the one subject where that is genuinely true rather than a permission. Seven flowers in seven colours reads as a mixed bunch; seven flowers in one colour reads as a bought one; three colours distributed across seven heads reads as something between. Whichever way it goes, the ribbon is the place to put whatever colour is not in the flowers.

One plain point about the drawing. The petals nearer the outside of the bunch are drawn slightly larger than the ones towards the middle, and the flowers at the edges are set a little lower than those in the centre. That is how the drawing makes a flat arrangement look like a rounded one, and following it while you colour — keeping the outer flowers a touch lighter than the inner ones — reinforces it at no extra cost.

Print at actual size on plain A4 paper so the petal outlines stay open where the flowers overlap. If markers are the plan, thicker card is worth the swap, since the heads carry most of the ink and they are all in the top half of the page. Trimmed just outside the outer petals and down past the ribbon, the whole bouquet comes away as one silhouette to glue to the front of a folded piece of card; left whole, it tapes to a window, where the light comes through the stems most clearly.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026610 words