Mandala Coloring Pages

Nothing is printed in black

Mandalas are usually decorated with alternating black and white segments. It looks striking in a book and it is useless on a coloring page — half the design arrives already coloured, and the half you are given is the half the artist chose. Every ring, petal, teardrop and segment on these twenty pages is an outline with white paper inside it, so every decision is yours.

Easy ones to start with

Three of the pages are built for a first mandala: five rings, big open areas and thick lines that a crayon will not slip over. The cat mandala works for a child of five or six, and the simple geometric one is a good introduction to keeping a colour scheme symmetrical.

Five animal mandalas

An elephant in the Indian ceremonial style, an owl with its wings spread as the first ring, a wolf whose sixty fur tufts radiate outward into the pattern, a sea turtle whose shell is thirteen separately patterned plates, and a cat. In each one the animal is drawn open — no grey elephant, no dark wolf, no shaded shell.

The long ones

The tree of life mirrors its branches in its roots and fills the whole circle. The paisley, lotus, rose, peacock feather and geometric mandalas will each hold an adult for an hour or more.

How to colour a mandala

Pick your palette before you start and work one ring at a time from the centre out, using the same colour in the same position on every repeat. That is what makes a mandala read as one thing rather than as a wheel of unrelated shapes. If a ring looks too busy, leave it white — the empty rings are what let the others breathe.

Printing

Print at 100% scale rather than “fit to page”, and match the file to your paper — Letter or A4. The button at the top bundles all twenty into a single download.