Reindeer Coloring Pages

Reindeer having a busy Christmas

Most of the middle pages give the reindeer something to do. One glides across a frozen pond in a bobble hat, two race downhill on a wooden sledge, and a young one in flying goggles leaps off a hill while its coach takes notes on a clipboard. Another has got itself tangled in a string of Christmas lights. There is a reindeer baking star cookies in a chef’s hat, one delivering the Christmas mail, two finishing a snowman, and a tall reindeer putting the star on the tree while a little one wears the baubles on its antlers.

Cute reindeer and a reindeer face

The reindeer face fills the page: big antlers, long eyelashes, a round nose and a bow tie, with nothing else to get in the way. The friendly reindeer stands in the snow with a sprig of holly hooked on one antler, the baby reindeer hugs a present in a floppy Santa hat, and another smiles out from the middle of a Christmas wreath.

Real reindeer

Reindeer and caribou are the same animal, and they are the only deer in which the females grow antlers too — which is why the mother in the reindeer family page has a set of her own. The realistic page is a big caribou on the tundra with sweeping antlers and a shaggy winter mane, and the northern lights page has a herd of five walking past the snowy pines under ribbons of light.

Patterns for older colourists

The detailed pages are for pencils. The Nordic reindeer is painted like Scandinavian folk art, with scrolling antlers that end in tulips; the zentangle reindeer has a different pattern in every section of its body; the mandala rings a reindeer’s head with snowflakes, holly and leaping reindeer; and the portrait shows a reindeer in an embroidered collar hung with jingle bells.

A set for the whole family

The five easy pages have thick outlines and big open shapes for a young child. The nine middle pages will hold a school-age child for half an hour. The six detailed pages — the Nordic reindeer, the realistic reindeer, the harness portrait, the zentangle reindeer, the mandala and the northern lights — will take an adult most of an evening.

Print the whole set at once

The button at the top of this page bundles all twenty into a single download, so you can print the lot for a class or a December afternoon rather than picking through them one at a time. Every page comes as a PDF in both US Letter and A4.

What to colour them with

Real reindeer are brown and cream with a pale mane, but nothing says the one on the ice has to be. Crayons and markers suit the easy pages; the zentangle reindeer, the mandala and the harness portrait are better with coloured pencils.

More Christmas pages

Santa’s own reindeer team is in the Santa coloring pages, and a sheet of antlers to cut out for a costume is in the deer coloring pages. There are also twenty Christmas coloring pages, twenty Christmas stocking coloring pages, twenty angel coloring pages and twenty gingerbread coloring pages.