Butterfly Coloring Pages

Most butterfly sheets are one symmetrical shape on an empty page, colored in five minutes and forgotten. These free printable butterfly coloring pages keep the symmetry where it belongs, on the wings, and give the butterfly somewhere to be: a thistle head, a windowsill, the rim of a teacup, a puddle at the edge of a path. That matters for the sheets a child brings to the table twice, and it gives the page a background worth coloring as well.

The species are drawn from the real insects. The monarch has its veins and its white border spots, the swallowtail its tails, the peacock butterfly its four dark eyespots. The rest spread across the garden: a bee sharing a coneflower, a butterfly on a bicycle basket full of cut flowers, another on a gatepost wrapped in ivy.

Which sheet for which age

• Toddlers and preschoolers: the big open wings. Thick outlines, few areas, nothing smaller than a crayon tip.
• Five to eight: the garden scenes. One butterfly, one plant, some sky.
• Nine and up: the life cycle sheet, where the caterpillar's segments and the milkweed flowers reward a sharp pencil.
• Grown-ups: the pattern wings and the stained glass panel.

Quick to color above the grid keeps the simplest and opens on the fastest of all.

• A caterpillar on a fennel stem
• A butterfly drinking at a puddle
• A jar of flowers on a windowsill

Hand those out first at a table of mixed ages. The children who finish in five minutes can take a second.

Coloring a butterfly so it looks like a butterfly

• Work outwards from the body. Real wings are darkest near the body and lightest at the edge. Press hard at the base and let the pressure fade.
• Both wings, the same order. Color the left wing, then repeat the exact sequence on the right. A butterfly that is not symmetrical reads as a moth.
• Veins last, in black. They are the lines that make the wing look thin.
• Leave the border spots white. Bare paper is brighter than any white pencil.
• Monarch: orange and black. Swallowtail: pale yellow with black bands and a blue smudge near the tails. Peacock: red-brown with blue-ringed eyespots.

Growing one, or just watching for them

The life cycle sheet is the one teachers ask for: four stages on one milkweed plant, in order, on a page a child can label. Two others go closer, at the leaf a caterpillar has already bitten through and at the moment the wings come out crumpled.

For a garden that brings them in, the sheets double as a list: coneflowers, lavender, hollyhocks, thistles, buddleia. The flower coloring pages have more of the same plants without the insects.

Turning a finished sheet into a summer's worth of looking

The best thing to do with a colored butterfly is to go and find the real one, and a few of these pages are built to help.

Color the four-stage sheet, cut the stages apart and pin them by the back door in the order they happen. Children check them off across a season: eggs in May, caterpillars in June, the chrysalis, then the wings. It takes months and that is the point.

The single-species sheets work as a home-made field guide. Color the monarch, the swallowtail and the peacock butterfly as accurately as you can manage, staple them into a booklet, and keep it with the sun hats. A child who has spent twenty minutes filling a wing knows that wing afterwards, which is more than a photograph in a book will do.

Two smaller uses, for when the drawing is finished and nobody wants to throw it away: cut a butterfly out and tape it to a plant pot as a label, with the plant's name written on the underwing; or trim one down to a bookmark, wings folded up so they stick out of the top of the page. Both take a minute and both mean the sheet is still around in a month.

If the garden is the part that interests you more than the insect, the nature coloring pages and the spring coloring pages carry the same plants through the year.

Butterfly coloring pages for adults

The other end of the set is the pattern work. Lots of detail keeps it and opens on the densest.

• A butterfly on a spike of blossom
• Monarchs clustered on a fir branch
• A net and jar left in the grass

Sharp colored pencils beat markers in spaces that small, and a limited palette holds the page together: three colors and their darker versions will do more than twelve. The mandala coloring pages carry on in the same vein if the symmetry is what you came for.

What the wings are actually made of

A butterfly's wing is covered in thousands of microscopic scales, overlapping like tiles, and every color on these pages comes from one of two sources.

Pigment colors are the browns, blacks, oranges and yellows, made by chemicals in the scales. Structural colors are the blues and the metallic greens, and they are not pigment at all: the scales are ridged at a scale finer than light, and they bounce particular colors back. That is why a blue morpho changes shade as it turns, and why no blue pencil ever quite matches it.

The scales rub off easily, which is the reason for the old advice not to handle butterflies.

Other details on these sheets are worth naming. A butterfly has four wings, not two, and the forewing overlaps the hindwing. The coiled tube at the head is a proboscis, unrolled to drink and coiled away like a watch spring. The antennae end in small clubs, which is the reliable way to tell a butterfly from a moth: moth antennae are feathered or pointed.

And the eyespots on the peacock butterfly are defensive, startling a bird that expects a snack and finds something apparently staring back.

Cutting, hanging and pinning up

Printed on card, the single butterflies cut out along the wing edge without tearing. Some sheets were drawn for that: the bunting, four strung lines of paper butterflies, and the mobile, a hoop hung with five butterflies and paper stars over a cot.

The sheets are A4. Print at 100 % scale on A4, or choose "fit to page" on US Letter so nothing is clipped, and turn draft mode off so the thin veins stay black. The printing guide covers paper weights. Press Add to pack under each sheet you want and print the selection as one PDF.