Deer Coloring Pages

A deer seen at the edge of a wood is one of those moments children remember, and these deer coloring pages try to keep it: the stag that lifts his head above the bracken, the fawn hidden in the grass, the doe that stops at the water to drink.

Several kinds of deer are here. A red deer stag faces forward with his neck ruff and wide antlers, a roe deer buck turns his head in profile, a fallow deer stands in front of a fence with a spotted coat, and a white-tailed deer bounds through tall grass with its tail up. The family pages follow a doe and her fawn: a fawn asleep in a nest of grass, a fawn close to its mother in a clearing, a doe grooming her young, a fawn following her down a path between curling ferns. The stags have the woodland to themselves, standing in velvet among the bracken, rubbing their antlers on a tree, wading in a river, crossing a footbridge, stepping out of a stand of birches, sheltering from the rain and standing on a ridge above a valley at the end of the day.

The seasons run through the set. There is a meadow where two small birds ride on a deer's back, an apple tree with windfalls in the grass, a walled vegetable garden with the gate left open, then falling snow, a deer digging for grass by a snowy fence post, and a robin in the bare winter trees. Reindeer close the cold season, one in a plain harness, one pulling a sledge of firewood, two grazing by a frozen lake. For older colorers, a shed antler lies among oak leaves and acorns, a stag head sits in an oak wreath, and four deer face outward in a round mandala.

Antlers fall off every year

Antlers are not horns. They are made of bone, and in most kinds of deer only the males grow them. Every spring they start again from two small bumps on the head, covered in a soft furry skin called velvet that carries the blood the bone needs to grow. By late summer the antler is finished, the velvet dries and the stag rubs it off against young trees, which is exactly what one of the pages shows. After the autumn rut, somewhere between midwinter and early spring depending on the kind of deer, the antlers drop off, and the whole cycle starts again.

That is why people find antlers lying on the ground in the woods, like the one on the page with the acorns. Mice and squirrels gnaw them for the minerals, so an old antler in the forest often has little tooth marks along it. Reindeer are the exception to the male-only rule: both males and females grow antlers.

Why a fawn has spots

A newborn fawn is covered in white spots, and they are there to hide it. Lying still in long grass or under ferns, a spotted coat looks just like sunlight falling through leaves. In its first weeks the fawn spends most of the day alone like this, curled up and silent, while its mother feeds nearby and comes back to nurse. The spots fade after a few months, once the fawn is fast enough to follow her.

It also explains a rule worth teaching children: a fawn alone in the grass has almost always not been abandoned. Its mother is close, waiting for people to leave, and the right thing to do is to look, walk away and let her come back.

The real colors of a deer coat

A deer is not one brown, and the color depends on the season as much as on the kind.

• In summer most deer are a warm reddish brown. Color the body in orange-brown and go over it lightly with a darker brown along the back.
• In winter the coat turns grayer and thicker, so the snow pages look right in gray-brown, with the belly lighter.
• The white patches are important: under the tail, inside the ears, on the throat and around the muzzle. Leave them as bare paper.
• The nose and eyes are nearly black, and a tiny white dot left in each eye brings the face to life.
• Antlers are a pale bone color, darker at the base and almost white at the tips.
• Reindeer are lighter, often cream or pale gray at the neck, and the fallow deer can be anything from spotted chestnut to almost white.

Quiet portraits and full woodland scenes

The quickest pages keep the animal large and the background almost empty, like the portraits and the fawn asleep in the grass. Quick to color, above the grid, begins with:

• Roe deer portrait
• Fawn asleep in the grass
• Red deer stag portrait

The dense ones are full of ferns, stones and leaves, where every frond is a small shape of its own. Lots of detail begins with:

• Fawn in a walled garden
• Deer mandala with acorns
• Stag by a drystone wall

A stag head that hurts no one

The stag head in the oak wreath makes a good wall piece. Color it in browns and greens, cut around the wreath, and glue it onto a round wooden board or a circle of thick card with a ribbon for hanging. It gives a child's room the look of an old hunting lodge without any animal involved, and the acorns and leaves can match the rest of the room.

The winter and reindeer pages have another use in December: fold a finished page in half, or cut out the reindeer with the firewood sledge, and it becomes a homemade card.

Printing deer for the table or the wall

Each page is a free A4 PDF at 300 dpi. Print it at full size on A4, or choose "fit to page" on US Letter, which scales the drawing down by about six percent so that no antler tip is cut off. The printing guide walks through the setting. Add to pack collects several deer into a single file. Other woodland animals live in the bear coloring pages and the squirrel coloring pages, the snowy scenes continue in the winter coloring pages, and every other creature is in the animal coloring pages.