Cheetah Coloring Pages

A cheetah is built for one thing, and it does that thing better than any animal on land. These cheetah coloring pages show the sprint, of course, but also everything around it: the long waits on a lookout, the naps in the shade, the cubs that spend their first months tumbling over each other.

A cheetah sprints across the grass with dust flying behind it and bounds along with its tail held high. It stands on a termite mound, on a pile of boulders with birds circling overhead and on a fallen tree while gazelles graze in the distance. It drinks at a waterhole, stretches beside a boulder, yawns on a rock at sunset, walks along a ridge in front of a huge rising sun, crosses cracked dry earth and slips past a fence post. It rests along a branch, naps among the roots of a baobab, peeks out of tall grass, rolls in the dust, grooms its ringed tail and climbs a leaning tree. It even sits on the hood of a safari truck, which really happens in some parks.

The cub pages are some of the sweetest. A fluffy cub sits with its tail around its paws, three cubs scramble over a log, two stalk a butterfly in the grass, two more play leapfrog, huddle under an acacia in the rain and peek out of a hollow log. A mother carries her cub by the scruff of the neck and nuzzles another under a tree. There are meetings with a warthog and with a serval, a smaller spotted cat with enormous ears, two brothers sitting back to back, and portraits: a face close-up, a profile and a face framed by leaves.

The fastest animal on land

A cheetah can reach around 60 to 70 miles per hour, but only in short bursts of a few hundred yards. Everything about its body serves that sprint. It is slim and light, with long legs, a deep chest for big lungs and a small head. Its claws stay partly out, like the spikes on a running shoe, to grip the ground. The long tail works as a rudder, swinging to keep the cat balanced when the chase turns sharply. After a run, a cheetah is so hot and out of breath that it often has to rest before it can eat.

A few other things set it apart from the big cats:

• It cannot roar. Cheetahs purr, and they chirp like birds to call their cubs.
• It hunts in daylight, mostly in the morning and late afternoon, when lions and hyenas are resting.
• Brothers often stay together for life, in small groups called coalitions, which is what the back-to-back page shows.

Cheetahs are also in trouble. Only around seven thousand are left in the wild, most of them in southern and eastern Africa, with a very small group in Iran.

Cheetah or leopard?

The two are easy to mix up on paper, and the difference matters when you color. A cheetah has solid, round black spots, a slim body and two black lines running from the inside of each eye down to the mouth, called tear marks. They are thought to cut the glare of the sun, a little like the dark marks athletes paint under their eyes. A leopard is heavier, has no tear marks, and its spots are rosettes: rings of black around a darker center.

Coloring a cheetah

The coat is a warm tawny gold, lighter on the chest, belly and inside of the legs, which are almost white. The spots and tear marks are black. The end of the tail changes from spots to black rings and finishes with a white tip. The eyes are amber.

Cubs are different, and the pages show it: for their first months they wear a mantle of long, fluffy, silvery gray fur along the back, which makes them look a little like a honey badger and may help keep them safe. Color the back of a cub pale gray, the legs and face darker.

A good trick for all that spotting: color the whole coat gold first, then go over the spots in black. A gold pencil laid over black spots only muddies them.

Quick cats and busy savannas

The simplest pages keep one cheetah large with little around it. Quick to color, above the grid, begins with:

• Rolling in the dust
• Cheetah in profile
• Standing cheetah

The detailed pages are full of grass, acacia branches and cracked earth, and every spot is its own tiny shape. Lots of detail begins with:

• On the safari truck
• Hidden in the grass
• By the fence

A lesson on speed

Cheetahs make a lively science or math starter. Mark out 100 feet in a playground or a hallway and time the children running it; a cheetah at top speed covers that distance in about a second. Then color the sprint page and write the times on the back. For younger children, the cub pages go well with a simple story about growing up: a cub stays with its mother for about a year and a half while it learns to hunt.

Printing a savanna

Every page is a free A4 PDF drawn at 300 dpi. A4 prints at full size, and on US Letter "fit to page" shrinks the drawing by about six percent so every spot and whisker stays on the paper. The printing guide shows the setting. Add to pack gathers a whole savanna into one file. More big cats are in the tiger coloring pages and the lion coloring pages, and more African animals in the elephant coloring pages and the zoo coloring pages.