Adult Coloring Pages

Nothing is printed dark for you

This is where most adult coloring pages go wrong. To make a page look impressive as a thumbnail, the artwork arrives with large areas already filled solid black — the wolf's mask, the leading between stained glass panes, the body of the moth, the socks on a fox. Those are the areas you were going to enjoy most, and they are gone before you start.

On every page here, every single cell of every pattern is a hollow outline with white paper inside it. The peacock's eye-spots are concentric rings, not black discs. The stained glass leading is a thin line the same weight as every other line, not a heavy band. The dragonfly's wings are a net of small open cells. The whole sheet is yours.

Patterned animals

Nine of the twenty: an elephant divided into about twenty patterned zones, a wolf's head inside a ring of rays, a horse with a flowing banded mane, a sea turtle whose shell is eighteen separate plates, an owl on a branch under a ring of stars, a hummingbird at a trumpet flower, a dragonfly among the reeds, three koi circling through lotus flowers, and a peacock with its tail fanned across the whole page.

Botanical and decorative

A spray of nine wildflower species drawn botanically — foxglove, cow parsley, poppies, thistle, lavender, brambles, harebells, daisies and a fern. A rose wreath with an empty centre. A tree of life whose trunk and roots are banded into patterned segments. Shells and coral. A cottage doorway under a climbing rose. Five hot air balloons. A fan of seven feathers.

And four pages of pure pattern: a paisley panel, a mehndi hand, a stained glass rose window of about seventy panes, and a moth under five moons.

What to colour these with

The areas on the densest pages — the paisley, the mehndi hand, the stained glass — are small enough that pencils will struggle to reach the corners. Fineliners or brush pens with a small tip work better. If you are using alcohol markers, print on 120gsm or heavier and put a spare sheet underneath, because they will bleed through ordinary copier paper.

More detailed pages across the site

Every set here sorts its pages easy first and detailed last, so the closing pages of any set are in this style — a couple of hundred of them. The mandala set is the obvious next stop, the cozy set is the gentler end of the same idea, and the landscape set ends with a zentangle landscape, a mountain landscape in a circle and a landscape mandala.