Beach Coloring Pages

A day at the beach has its own order: you pick your spot, build something, go looking for creatures in the rocks, swim, eat too much, and leave with a pocket full of shells. These beach coloring pages follow that day from start to finish.

Setting up comes first: two striped deck chairs under a beach umbrella, a straw hat, flip flops and sunglasses left on a towel, and a picnic under the palm trees with watermelon and a jug of juice. Then the building. A tall sandcastle with towers and a moat, another studded with shells, a boy filling a bucket with wet sand, a boy digging a channel from his moat to the sea, and a boy buried up to his shoulders while a friend pats the sand smooth.

The creatures are the best part of any beach. A crab crosses the wet sand among the shells, a hermit crab drags its spiral house along, a rock pool holds a starfish, a sea urchin, a sand dollar and anemones, and a row of baby sea turtles scurries toward the water. A sandpiper runs along the shore leaving footprints, a pelican stands on a mooring post, seagulls squabble over a dropped ice cream on the boardwalk, a jellyfish drifts beside a school of fish, and a dolphin leaps through a curling wave. Out on the water, a girl surfs a wave, a surfboard stands in the sand, a snorkeler floats over coral, a sailboat passes a buoy, and two players leap for the ball at a volleyball net. The shore itself has a lighthouse on a rocky point, a long wooden pier, a lifeguard tower with its rescue float, a driftwood shelter, a rowboat with its rope and anchor, and a cairn of stacked pebbles. A boy listens to a conch shell with his eyes closed, another flies a kite over the dunes, a puppy chases a ball, and a crab in sunglasses holds a tiny parasol. Two slower pages finish the set: a beach mandala of shells and starfish around a sun, and a collection of shells and sea glass laid out on a towel.

What makes sand, sea and sky look right

Beach pages have three big areas, and getting their colors right does most of the work.

Sand is not yellow. Dry sand is a pale beige or cream, and wet sand near the water is darker, a gray-brown that looks almost shiny. Color the band along the waterline a shade darker than the rest of the beach and the page immediately reads as a shore.

The sea changes color with depth. Use a pale turquoise near the sand, a medium blue further out and a deep blue at the horizon, in three bands. Leave the tops of the small waves white, like foam.

The sky is lightest near the horizon and deepest at the top. A light blue colored in one direction, pressing harder toward the top of the page, is enough.

Quick pages for the beach bag, long ones for the rental

A good share of this collection is quick to color: one wave, one surfboard, one crab, with open sand and sky around it, which suits a child of three or four. Quick to color, above the grid, begins with:

• Surfboard and a curling wave
• Dolphin leaping through a wave
• Boy listening to a conch shell

The densest pages are the built ones, the sandcastle with its hundreds of bricks, the lifeguard tower, the beach mandala, and they suit an older child on a rainy afternoon at the rental. Lots of detail opens on:

• Beach mandala
• Sandcastle with four towers
• Lifeguard tower with a rescue float

A shell walk and a sorting game

The shells on these pages are real kinds. The fan with ridges is a scallop, the long spiral with a wide opening is a conch, the pointed tower is a whelk or a turret shell, and the flat round one with a five-petal pattern is a sand dollar, which is the skeleton of a sea urchin relative, not a shell at all. After a real beach walk, children can match what they found to the drawings and color each one to match. At home, the page of shells laid out on a towel makes a sorting game: color all the scallops one color, all the spirals another.

Sea glass has a story too: it is ordinary broken glass that the sea has tumbled for years until the edges turn smooth and the surface frosted. Green and brown are common, blue is rare, and red is so rare that collectors keep a single piece for years.

What the tide leaves behind

The tideline, the wavy band of seaweed, shells and driftwood the sea leaves at high water, is where most of the treasures on these pages are found. Twice a day the tide rises and falls, pulled by the Moon, and each time it leaves a new line. The best time to look is just after the tide goes out: rock pools fill up with the creatures on the rock pool page, and the sand is scattered with fresh shells. A tide table, printed from any local weather site, turns a beach walk into a small expedition.

Protecting the beach

Several pages open a good conversation. Baby sea turtles hatch at night and head for the brightest horizon, which is supposed to be the moon over the water; bright lights on beach houses can confuse them, which is why some beaches turn off lights during nesting season. The rock pool creatures should stay in their pool, and a shell with an animal in it, like the hermit crab's, belongs on the beach.

Printing for a beach day

The pages are free downloads, 300 dpi PDFs sized for A4 paper. On A4, keep the scale at 100 %; on US Letter, "fit to page" makes the drawing about six percent smaller and loses nothing at the edges. The printing guide shows the option with screenshots. Gather a stack with Add to pack and print it as one file for the car, the rental or a rainy afternoon. Under the waves, the ocean coloring pages continue, the summer coloring pages fill the rest of the season, and the turtle coloring pages follow the hatchlings out to sea.