Duck Coloring Pages

Scenes, not specimens

Most duck coloring pages are a duck outline in the middle of a blank page. These are built in three depths instead: something small and near along the bottom — stones, lily pads, petals, spilled corn — the duck in the middle doing something, and a simple distance behind it of reeds, a barn or a line of treetops. There is more to fill in, and it holds a child a good deal longer.

Ducklings get their own pages

Far more people look for ducklings than for ducks, so they are not an afterthought here. There is a single fluffy duckling for the youngest colourists, one hatching out of a cracked egg, one sheltering under an umbrella in the rain, three peeking out of a woven basket, one meeting a frog on a lily pad, and a mother duck with her brood strung out behind her.

Rubber ducks too

A rubber duck is a different animal from a mallard, so it gets its own three pages: one big duck in a bubble bath, five in a row along the tub rim, and a collection of nine, each patterned differently — spots, stripes, stars, a sailor hat, sunglasses.

Nothing is filled in black

A mallard drake has a dark glossy head and an orange beak and feet, and most printable pages copy that — which quietly removes the parts a child would most enjoy colouring. Here the head, the chest, the beak and the webbed feet are all drawn as hollow outlines, and the feathers are rows of shapes rather than dark masses. The only solid black on any page is the pupil of an eye, because that is how a coloring book draws a friendly face.

Easy through to detailed

The five easy pages have thick outlines and large open areas that suit a fat crayon and a four-year-old. The nine middle pages — the farmyard, the reeds, the rain, the sunflowers, the flight over the lake — have enough going on to hold a school-age child for half an hour. The six detailed pages, including the feathered mallard, the lotus pond and the duck mandala, will take an adult most of an evening.

Print the whole set at once

The button at the top bundles all twenty into a single download, so you can print the lot the night before rather than picking through them one at a time. Every page is a vector PDF at 300 DPI in both US Letter and A4, so it stays sharp however far you zoom in.