Sunflower Coloring Pages

The life cycle of a sunflower

The life cycle page runs round in six circles joined by arrows: a striped seed in the soil; the seed splitting as a root goes down and a shoot comes up; a seedling with its first two round leaves; a young plant with a closed bud; the flower in full bloom; and the heavy head drooping and dropping its seeds, ready to start again. A small sun sits in the middle, because a sunflower needs plenty of it.

Every centre is hundreds of tiny flowers

What looks like one flower is really hundreds of tiny ones packed together, and each becomes a seed. They grow in two sets of spirals, one turning each way, and when you count them the numbers are usually neighbours in the Fibonacci sequence — 34 and 55, or 55 and 89. The botanical study shows the spiral on its own beside the bud, a single petal, the back of the flower head and three seeds; the mandala is built around a centre of spiralling seeds.

Sunflowers in the garden

A girl in a sun hat waters three young sunflowers of different heights. A boy climbs a stepladder to measure a sunflower far taller than the garden fence while his sister holds the tape and the puppy watches — giant varieties really can grow taller than a basketball hoop. Two little finches perch on a sunflower head to pick out the seeds, four butterflies visit three sunflowers, and a mouse shelters from the rain under a sunflower leaf. The hamster stuffing its cheeks with seeds has twenty friends in the hamster coloring pages.

Sunflowers in a vase

Vincent van Gogh painted sunflowers in an earthenware vase in 1888, wilting heads and all, and the still life page is in that spirit: open flowers facing every way, one seen from behind and two drooping over the rim. There is also a mason jar of sunflowers tied with a bow, a farm stand of buckets full of cut flowers, a bicycle with a basket of them, and a girl in a straw hat hugging an armful.

Detailed sunflowers for adults

The zentangle sunflower has a different pattern in every petal and rings of pattern in its centre. The stained glass window sets three sunflowers against rays of glass under a round arch. The pattern page packs sunflowers of three sizes together with leaves, daisies and ladybirds, and HELLO SUNSHINE is lettered under an arch of sunflowers.

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 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 rainy 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

Sunflowers are not only yellow — there are red, orange, bronze and cream varieties, and their centres run from brown to nearly black. Crayons suit the easy pages; for the zentangle, the mandala and the botanical study, sharp coloured pencils keep the small shapes crisp.

More flower pages

For every other bloom see the flower coloring pages, and there are twenty butterfly coloring pages, twenty summer coloring pages and twenty fall coloring pages.