Axolotl Coloring Pages

An axolotl looks like it was drawn to be colored: a wide smile, tiny dot eyes, and six feathery gills sticking out of its head like a crown. These axolotl coloring pages show the real animal in its tank and its lake, follow it from the egg, and then let it go full kawaii.

The portraits come first, an axolotl facing straight out of the page with its gills fanned, and one drawn side on so its long finned tail and four-toed feet show. Then life in the tank: resting on the gravel in front of a sunken pot, walking between tall stem plants, floating by the filter, peeking out of a cave, lying in a clay pipe, dozing on a stack of flat stones, hiding under a slate with only its gills showing, climbing driftwood among sword plants, watching bubbles rise from an air stone and lying on a pile of marimo moss balls. It catches a worm from feeding tongs, meets a goldfish through a divider, gives a snail a ride on its back and wears a leaf as a hat. A whole aquarium on its cabinet, a thermometer and a net, an axolotl lifted in a soft net over a bucket and one waiting in a shallow dish show the keeper's side.

The life cycle has its pages: a cluster of eggs in jelly on a plant stem and baby axolotls with their gills still tiny. The wild appears too, an axolotl on a lake bed of reeds, one swimming among hanging roots, one in a jar held in two hands. The kawaii axolotls are pure fun: in a party hat with a cupcake, asleep in a teacup, eating a slice of cake, hugging a mug of cocoa in a bobble hat, and lounging on a swim ring. For a slower hour there is a patterned axolotl in a ring of weed and an axolotl mandala.

The salamander that never grows up

An axolotl is a salamander, a close cousin of the frog, but it never finishes growing up. Most salamanders lose their gills and walk out onto land as adults. The axolotl keeps its baby features its whole life, including those feathery gills, and stays in the water. Scientists call this neoteny, and it is why an adult axolotl still looks like a cheerful larva.

It can also do something almost no other animal can: grow back what it loses. An axolotl can regrow a whole leg, its tail, parts of its heart and even parts of its brain, without a scar. Laboratories around the world study it for that reason.

In the wild it lives in only one place, the canals and lakes of Xochimilco, on the edge of Mexico City, and it is critically endangered there. The name comes from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, and is usually linked to Xolotl, a god of fire and lightning who, in one story, turned himself into an axolotl to escape.

Pink, gold, black or wild

The pink axolotl everyone pictures is only one color. Pet axolotls come in several:

• Leucistic: pale pink-white body, dark eyes and bright red gills. This is the famous one.
• Wild type: dark olive or brown with small speckles, the way they look in the lake.
• Golden albino: warm yellow-gold with pale eyes.
• Melanoid: almost black all over.

Whatever color the body, the gills are usually the brightest part, pink or red, because blood shows through the thin feathery filaments. So color the body first in a soft even layer, then go back to the gills with a stronger pink or red and let each frond keep a little white at its tip.

Many children first met axolotls in Minecraft, where they come in pink, brown, gold, cyan and a rare blue. Any of those works on these pages, and the Minecraft coloring pages have their own blocky world to go with them.

Pages for small children and for patient ones

Most of these pages are quick to color. An axolotl is a simple shape, a round head, a soft body and a tail, and many pages keep it large with only a pebble or two around it, which suits a child of three or four. Quick to color, above the grid, starts with:

• Axolotl portrait facing forward
• Axolotl seen from the side
• Axolotl swimming up to the surface

The denser pages are the full tanks and the lake, where every pebble of gravel, plant leaf and root is its own shape. Lots of detail opens on:

• Axolotl resting on aquarium gravel
• Axolotl floating by the filter
• Axolotl in a lake with reeds

What a real axolotl tank needs

The tank pages are drawn with gravel, but a child who wants an axolotl of their own should know that real keepers avoid it. Axolotls swallow their food whole with a big gulp and can swallow small stones too, so a good tank has fine sand, bare glass or stones bigger than the axolotl's head. They also like cold water, around 60 to 64 °F, much cooler than a tropical fish tank, which is what the thermometer on the tank page is for. The hides, the pipe, the cave and the slate are all right: axolotls dislike bright light and want somewhere dark to rest.

A nice project for a child asking for a pet is to design the tank on paper first. Color the whole-aquarium page as the tank they would build, with the hides, plants and axolotl colors they would choose.

Kawaii stickers and a science table

The kawaii axolotls make good stickers: color them in pinks and pastels, cut around each one leaving a thin white border, and cover the front with clear tape. The teacup and cocoa pages are the most popular for that.

For a classroom, the eggs, the baby axolotls and the portrait make a short life cycle set, and the regeneration story is a science hook that works with any age. The frog coloring pages have the full frog life cycle for comparison, and the kawaii coloring pages keep the cute side going.

Printing an aquarium of pages

The pages are free PDFs at 300 dpi, laid out for A4 paper. Print A4 at full size; for US Letter, pick "fit to page", and the axolotl comes out about six percent smaller with every gill intact. Screenshots of that setting are in the printing guide. Add to pack collects several pages into one file. The fish coloring pages fill out an aquarium.