Cow Coloring Pages

These cow coloring pages start with the breeds, drawn so you can tell them apart. A Holstein looks straight at you with her patches mapped across her neck and shoulders, then stands side on in a paddock by a hay rack. A Highland cow fills the page with her fringe and horns, stands in the heather on a windy slope, and lies as a fluffy calf in the bracken. There is a Jersey in profile with a bell on her collar, a Belted Galloway in the buttercups, a white faced Hereford looking over a hedge, a Texas Longhorn whose horns run nearly off the page, a Brown Swiss chewing in the straw, a small stocky Dexter beside a barrow of turnips, an Ayrshire at a stone trough and a humped zebu under a shade tree.

The rest of the collection is the everyday life of a herd, which turns out to be funnier than you would think. A cow scratches her neck on a gate post until it leans, wades through a ford under a stone bridge, and lies under an apple tree with a magpie standing on her back. The herd walks a country lane between the hedges. One cow pushes her head through a farmhouse window and knocks over the flowers, another strolls past a village bakery, and a third peeks out of a sunflower field with only her face showing. There is a calf being licked clean by its mother, three calves staring at a bicycle over a fence, a cow in a checked blanket lying in the snow, and another nosing through a pumpkin patch in the fall.

Where the time goes on a cow

A cow is one of the easiest big animals to color, because her body is a few large shapes: a barrel, four straight legs, a long face. What takes the time is whatever surrounds her. A cow on plain paper goes quickly, and the same cow in a field of clover or sunflowers can fill an afternoon.

The Quick to color button above the grid keeps the open pages, and these lead it:

• A Jersey cow in profile with a bell
• A Holstein cow portrait facing forward
• A spotted calf with long legs

Those are the ones to hand a five year old with thick crayons. The patches are big closed shapes, so a child can fill them in one color and the body in another without anything getting lost at the edges.

Lots of detail keeps the busy end, where sunflowers, a pumpkin patch or a whole row of cows fill the page.

• A cow peeking out of a sunflower field
• Holstein cows at the feed barrier
• A cow nosing a pumpkin in a pumpkin patch

No two Holsteins have the same patches

The black and white pattern of a Holstein works like a fingerprint: no two cows carry the same one, and farmers have long used sketches or photos of the patches to identify their animals. That makes a Holstein page a small drawing exercise as well as a coloring one. On the paddock sheet the patches are already drawn as closed shapes, but on the portrait you can decide for yourself where the black stops, and the sheet with a row of heads at the feed barrier is a good place to give every cow her own pattern.

Holsteins are not always black and white, either. Red and white Holsteins exist, and they look exactly the same with a rust brown where the black would be. If a child wants to color the cow brown, they are not wrong.

Getting each breed right

The breeds on these pages all have a color that is theirs, and it is worth looking them up together before starting.

• Highland: most often a warm ginger red, but also black, cream, silver and brindle. The fringe over the eyes has its own name in Gaelic, the dossan, and it keeps flies and rain out of the eyes. Color the long coat in strokes that follow the strands, and leave a thread of white paper along each one.
• Jersey: a fawn brown that darkens toward the face and the back legs, with a pale ring around the muzzle and big dark eyes. It is the cow behind the richest, yellowest butter.
• Hereford: a deep red body with a white face, white chest and white tail tip.
• Belted Galloway: black, red or dun, with a white band around the middle like a belt. The page draws that band as one shape, so leaving it empty is enough.
• Texas Longhorn: any mix of red, white, brown and speckles, which leaves room for anything. The horns are the point, and on a big steer they can span wider than a grown man's outstretched arms.
• Brown Swiss: a soft gray brown with a dark nose ringed in cream.
• Ayrshire: red brown patches on white, with patch edges that look torn rather than round.

For any cow, the nose is pink, gray or black depending on the breed, the hooves are dark, and the inside of the ears is a paler tone than the outside.

Why a cow wraps her tongue around grass

One sheet shows a cow with her tongue curled around a tuft of grass, and it is not a joke. Cows have no top front teeth. Where you would expect them there is a hard pad of gum, so a cow cannot bite grass off. She wraps her long tongue around it, pulls it against her bottom teeth and tears it. Later she brings it back up and chews it again, which is what chewing the cud means, and the Brown Swiss lying in the straw is doing exactly that.

A few words for the fact file: a young cow is a calf, a young female that has not had a calf yet is a heifer, and a male kept for breeding is a bull. A group of Highland cattle has a name of its own, a fold.

A breed matching game from the finished pages

Once the breeds are colored, they make a simple game. Print two copies of each breed page, color the pairs the same way, and cut them into cards. Played face down as a memory game, the Highland, the Belted Galloway and the Hereford are easy to match, while the Holstein and the Ayrshire make children look properly at the pattern. Write the breed name on the back of each card and the game doubles as a lesson before a farm visit.

For the rest of the barnyard, the farm coloring pages bring the farmer, the tractor and the barn, and the duck coloring pages fill the pond. Press Add to pack under each drawing you want and print them as one PDF. The pack stays in your browser while you move between collections, so a few horse coloring pages or other 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.