Bear Coloring Pages

This collection is two collections sharing a word. One half is real bears, drawn as five different species that you can tell apart once you know what to look for. The other half is teddy bears, with stitched seams and button eyes.

The real ones start with portraits: a grizzly facing forward with its shoulder hump and dished face, a giant panda with round ears and slanted eye patches, and an Asiatic black bear on a rock ledge with the pale crescent on its chest. Around them is a year of bear life. A grizzly catches a leaping salmon in a shallow river and walks a riverbed with a cub following in its tracks. A black bear cub clings halfway up a pine, another crosses a fallen trunk above a gorge, and a third lifts the lid off a wooden beehive with the frames stacked beside it. A brown bear carries her cub on her back through a meadow of tall flowers, reaches up for apples in an orchard, and stands in a stream with one paw raised while the minnows scatter. A polar bear shakes the water from its coat at the edge of a floe, and a polar cub lies pressed against its mother inside a snow den.

The pandas get their own corner: one peeling a bamboo stalk with the stripped stems piled around, one asleep in the fork of a tree with its legs hanging either side, one crossing a rope bridge, a cub rolling down a grassy slope, and two cubs tugging opposite ends of the same stalk.

Teddy bear coloring pages

The teddy bears are the other half, and they are not an afterthought. One sits on a workbench being mended, needle and thread in its paw with a patch on its tummy. One is pegged by both ears on a washing line. One rides in a doll pram with a blanket tucked over its legs, one is packed in an open suitcase among folded clothes, one lies in a toy hospital bed with a bandaged paw, and three sit round a low table on a lawn with a teapot and a plate of biscuits. The last one is left on a park bench with a scarf round its neck and the leaves gathered at its feet.

Which sheets for which age

Quick to color above the grid keeps the portraits and the single animals. A bear on plain ground is one big shape, a muzzle and four paws, with very little inside it.

• Teddy Bear Portrait
• Polar Cub in the Den
• Asiatic Black Bear

Lots of detail keeps the other end, and there is a pattern in it worth knowing: the pandas are the densest sheets here, and it is not the bear, it is the bamboo. Leaves fill every corner of those pages. The decorative bear face, with its fur in symmetrical scallops inside a ring of pine cones, is the one pure pattern sheet.

• Decorative Bear Face
• Sleeping Panda
• Rolling Panda Cub

Telling five bears apart

This is the useful part, and it holds whether you are coloring or just looking.

• Grizzly: a hump of muscle over the shoulders and a dished face, curved inward between the eyes and the nose. The coat runs from dark chocolate through to pale straw blond, often with lighter tips over the shoulders.
• Black bear: no hump, a straight face profile and taller, rounder ears. Despite the name they come in cinnamon and light brown as often as black, so a brown one is not a mistake.
• Asiatic black bear: black with a clear cream crescent across the chest, which is why it is called the moon bear. That crescent is the whole point of the sheet, so leave it bare paper.
• Polar bear: not white. The hairs are hollow and colorless, so the coat reads cream or ivory, warmer than the snow behind it. The skin underneath is black, which is why the nose, lips and paw pads are black. Leave the body almost bare and put all the darkness in the nose and eyes.
• Panda: black and white, and the black is properly black. Ears, eye patches, shoulders and all four legs, the legs joining into a band right around the body. The eye patches slant down and out.

For the real bears, work the coat in strokes that follow the fur rather than filling flat, and go darker along the belly and the back of the legs. Colored pencils hold that better than markers, and the colored pencil guide compares sets.

A teddy bear has no right color at all, which makes those sheets the free ones. The classic is golden mohair with a darker muzzle and paw pads, but what makes a teddy read as a teddy is the stitched seam down the face and the patches, so keep those lines clean and the rest is yours.

Five bears, and how to tell them apart

The bears on these pages are drawn as distinct species, and the differences are visible once pointed out.

Brown bears and grizzlies have a pronounced hump of muscle over the shoulders, a dished face and long straight claws for digging. That hump is the giveaway.

Black bears have no hump, a straight profile, taller ears and shorter curved claws for climbing. They are often not black at all but cinnamon or blond.

Polar bears are not white. The fur is hollow and clear, the skin underneath is black, and the animal looks white for the same reason snow does. Color the fur as bare paper with blue-gray shadow, and keep black for the nose, the eyes and the pads.

Pandas are bears, despite the argument, and eat a diet almost entirely of bamboo that their gut is not really built for.

Sun bears are the smallest, with a pale horseshoe on the chest and a startlingly long tongue for honey.

One thing they share: bears walk plantigrade, flat on the whole foot like a person, which is why they can stand up and why their tracks look almost human. Drawing the whole sole on the ground is what makes a bear look like a bear rather than a large dog.

Through the year, and where the rest of the bears are

The seasons are all here: the snow den and the floe for winter, the meadow of flowers and the wrestling cubs for spring, the salmon run and the stream for summer, the orchard apples and the leaves at the foot of the park bench for autumn.

More bears turn up elsewhere on the site. A bear asleep in a den under snow covered roots is in the winter coloring pages, a bear with an acorn among mushrooms is in the fall coloring pages, and the cozy coloring pages have teddy bears baking, reading by a fire and sitting in a classroom. Two neighbors are often confused with this collection and have their own: the panda coloring pages hold the one bear that lives on bamboo, and the koala coloring pages the animal everyone calls a bear and is not.

Press Add to pack under each drawing you want and print the selection as one PDF. The pack stays in your browser while you move between collections, so a few animal coloring pages can join the same print.

Each drawing is a free printable PDF at 300 dpi, unwatermarked, with nothing to sign up for. The pages are A4: actual size on A4, "fit to page" on US Letter. The printing guide covers paper and settings.