Bunny Coloring Pages

These bunny coloring pages are real rabbits, drawn the way they actually sit, dig and sleep, and they start with the breeds. A Holland Lop faces you with its ears hanging down either side of a round muzzle, an English Lop lies on a rug with its long ears spread across the floor, and an Angora fills the page with curling locks of wool. There is a Lionhead with a ruff around its face, a Rex whose short velvet coat is drawn in fine even strokes, a Dutch rabbit with its black and white saddle standing up at the hutch door, an English Spot running down a garden path with its chain of spots, a Harlequin among greenhouse pots, a Netherland Dwarf tucked into the pocket of a gardening apron, and a Flemish Giant taking up the whole sofa.

Then the wild ones. A rabbit sits at the mouth of its burrow with the tunnels showing in the cut bank below, and a cutaway of a warren shows the chambers under a meadow of flowers with rabbits resting in each. One thumps a warning, one presses flat in a ploughed furrow, one peers from a hollow tree, and a mother leads her young out from under a shed. Baby bunnies crowd a nest of grass and fur with one climbing over the edge.

The rest is rabbits being rabbits. They raid a raised bed for lettuces, squeeze under the vegetable plot fence, eat a dandelion, groom each other in the clover, leap in the air, race along a hedge, dig through snow and shelter under a porch step in the rain. Indoors one chews a cardboard box and one sleeps flat out on the kitchen floor; outside, another curls up in a flower pot at the shed door. A hedgehog shares a fallen pear with one of them, and another watches a blackbird pull up a worm.

Where the time goes on a rabbit

A rabbit is a round animal, and on plain ground it is one big outline with two ears and very little inside it. Those pages go fast, and a young child can finish one in a sitting. Quick to color, above the grid, keeps that end of the collection:

• A rabbit digging through the snow
• A Rex rabbit sitting in profile
• A wild rabbit at the mouth of its burrow

The breed portraits belong there too, fluffy or not: the Rex, the Angora and the Lionhead have their fur drawn in open strokes you color straight over, so it adds no small shapes to fill. The time goes into the places. A hutch door with its mesh and planks, a garden path lined with flowers, a raised bed where every lettuce is a rosette of leaves: each adds dozens of small shapes around the rabbit. Lots of detail gathers the pages that take an evening:

• A Dutch rabbit standing up at the hutch door
• A spotted rabbit running along a garden path
• A rabbit reaching for the lettuces in a raised bed

Why the breeds look so different

Every tame rabbit descends from one wild species, the European rabbit, and the breeds are what centuries of keepers chose to keep. That is why they are worth coloring side by side.

Lop ears are the easiest to spot. A lop's ears are too long and too heavy to stand, so they fall to the sides of the head, and on the English Lop they can measure more than the rabbit itself from tip to tip. The Angora was kept for its wool, which grows long, soft and continuously and is combed or clipped, then spun: the sheet with the spindles and carding brush beside the rabbit is showing exactly that. The Rex has a coat where the long guard hairs are the same length as the soft underfur, which gives it the feel of velvet. The Lionhead carries a gene that grows a mane around the face and nowhere else. And the Flemish Giant is simply big, often heavier than a small dog, and famously calm, which is why the one here has claimed the sofa.

Coloring a rabbit the color rabbits are

White rabbits with pink noses are a picture book habit. Wild rabbits are agouti: each hair is banded gray, brown and a little black, so from a distance the coat reads as a warm grayish brown. To get it, lay a light brown, then work gray over it in short strokes along the direction of the fur, and add a little black at the ear tips. The belly and the underside of the tail are white, and that white tail is a signal: a rabbit that runs flashes it at the others as a warning.

Pet breeds give you everything else. The Dutch pattern is fixed, a white blaze up the face, a white collar and front legs, and color on the back half, usually black but also blue, chocolate or tortoise. The English Spot has a stripe down the spine, a butterfly shape on the nose and spots running along each side. The Harlequin is the one to play with: patches of orange alternating with black or brown, split down the middle of the face. Pick two colors and alternate them panel by panel.

Leave a thin line of paper at the edge of each ear, and color the inside of the ear a pale pink with a darker streak down the middle where the veins show through.

Read the warning thump before the page

Several drawings here show real rabbit behavior, and each one is a short lesson for a child. The thump is a back foot hammered on the ground to warn the warren. The leap with all four feet in the air has a name among rabbit keepers, a binky, and it means the rabbit is happy. Two rabbits grooming each other are a bonded pair. The rabbit pressed flat in a furrow with its ears laid back is hiding, trusting its brown coat to disappear against the soil.

The baby bunnies are the other half of the lesson. Rabbits are born with no fur and closed eyes, in a nest the mother lines with fur pulled from her own chest, and they only come out after two or three weeks. And the lettuce raid is only half fair: a rabbit's real diet is mostly grass and hay, with leafy greens alongside and carrots as an occasional treat.

A breed wall, or a book for a new pet

Color the breed portraits and pin them in a row with each name written underneath, and you have a small chart that a child who wants a rabbit will study for weeks. A family that just brought one home can do better: color the pages that show a rabbit's day (the run on the lawn, the box being chewed, the nap on the kitchen floor, the basket in the hall) and staple them into a care book, adding what the rabbit eats and where it sleeps on the back of each page.

Around Easter, the same pages sit happily next to the Easter coloring pages, and the barnyard scenes in the farm coloring pages fill out a spring table. For something softer at bedtime, the cozy coloring pages include a bunny tucked into a canopy bed beside its teddy bears. Press Add to pack under each drawing 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.

The sheets are free printable PDFs at 300 dpi, with no watermark and no account. They are A4: print at actual size on A4, or choose "fit to page" on US Letter so nothing is cut off. The printing guide has the details.