Easy Coloring Pages

Choosing the right one

The three figures on every page, difficulty, age and time, are there to be read together, and the age is usually the most useful of the three. It is not about what a child can understand, it is about how long they can hold concentration on one sheet.

For the youngest hands

The 2+ and 3+ pages are the ones to reach for first. A face that fills the whole sheet, a body with nothing drawn inside it, a single object with room around it: a toddler can cover those in one go and the result still looks like the character. The Mickey Mouse coloring pages and the Stitch coloring pages hold most of them, because both characters are drawn almost entirely in closed rounded shapes.

In a preschool room

A classroom has constraints a kitchen table does not: everyone should finish at roughly the same time, and the sheet has to survive being photocopied. The four-and-up band works best, with enough background to occupy the fast finishers while the others catch up. Printing one drawing for the whole group beats letting each child pick, because choosing usually takes longer than coloring. These are ordinary line drawings, not color-by-number worksheets.

Printing so it stays easy

Set the print margins to None. Browsers default to a margin that shrinks the drawing by a fifth, and a smaller drawing means narrower shapes, which is exactly what makes a page hard for a young child. Ordinary printer paper is fine. If you have anything slightly heavier, felt tips bleed through it less.

When easy is no longer the point

At some stage a child starts wanting a page that takes an afternoon rather than ten minutes. That is the moment to move on: the Unicorn coloring pages run from very simple up to a fully detailed scene, and the Halloween coloring pages include a haunted castle with windows to fill one pane at a time. The Hello Kitty coloring pages sit somewhere between the two.