Spider Coloring Pages

Spider webs to colour

Six pages are webs. The easy one hangs from a branch and has only a few rings, so every cell is big enough for a crayon. The template is a round web with a hole to hang it by and three little spiders to colour and cut out — perfect for a Halloween window. One web stretches across the corner of an arched window with a jack-o-lantern on the sill; the mandala puts a spider at the heart of a web patterned with little diamonds; the stained glass window turns the threads into lead lines; and the doodle page fills each cell with a tiny pumpkin, bat, cat or moon.

Eight legs, not six

Spiders are not insects. An insect has six legs and three body parts; a spider has eight legs and two body parts, and belongs to the arachnids, along with scorpions and mites. Count the legs on any page here and there are eight. The life cycle page follows a spider from a silk egg sac full of eggs, to tiny spiderlings hatching, to young spiders drifting away on long threads of silk — ballooning, as it is called, can carry them for miles — to a grown spider sitting in its web.

Real spiders

The black widow is shown in its untidy tangle of a web beside its round egg sac, with the hourglass marking the females are known for. The jumping spider peeks over a leaf with its two enormous front eyes — jumping spiders hunt by sight rather than with a web and can leap many times their own length. The peacock spider is smaller than a grain of rice in real life; the males of this Australian spider raise a patterned fan and dance for a mate, so the page shows one enormous, mid-dance. And the tarantula is a big hairy one on a rock, every leg banded at the joints.

Spiders in stories

The itsy bitsy spider climbs up the waterspout, with the rain on one side and the sun coming out on the other. In Mary Howitt’s 1829 poem the spider asks the fly to walk into his parlour; here he pours the tea and offers little cakes while the fly hovers with an umbrella, deciding. And from the folk tales of the Akan people of Ghana there is Anansi, the clever spider, climbing a tree to hide the pot holding all the wisdom in the world, while his son calls up the advice he needed.

Friendly Halloween spiders

For Halloween there is a spider in a witch hat holding a jack-o-lantern full of sweets, a striped spider lowering itself onto a carved pumpkin with a candle inside, and the spider in the Halloween window. The rest of the year there is a mother spider hugging her three babies, and a spider in glasses knitting three socks at once in a rocking chair.

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, and the six detailed pages — the tarantula, the peacock spider, the web mandala, the zentangle spider, the stained glass web and the doodle page — 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 Halloween party rather than picking through them one at a time. Every page comes as a PDF in both US Letter and A4.

More Halloween pages

For the rest of October see the Halloween coloring pages, the ghost coloring pages, the Halloween cat coloring pages and the October coloring pages. For creepy-crawlies that are not spiders, there are the bug coloring pages.