Duck Coloring Pages

Most duck coloring pages draw the same duck twice. These name their breeds and draw them differently, which is the point: a mallard drake with his patterned head and broad flat bill, a Pekin carrying a rounded body upright on wide webbed feet, an Indian Runner standing tall and narrow like a bottle, a wood duck perched on a branch with its crest swept back, a Muscovy on a fence rail with its knobbled face, a Cayuga preening on a jetty plank, a Call duck small and round on her eggs, a crested duck with a pompom on its head, a Khaki Campbell stepping out of a feed shed and a Rouen asleep on the dock with its bill under a wing.

Around those portraits is a whole year of duck life. A duckling hatches out of a cracked egg, another stands alone on bare paper, a mallard hen shepherds six through long grass towards a gate, and one rides on its mother back in the middle of a pond. A duck lands with its wings braked wide, upends to feed with its tail in the air, shakes the water off on a stone step and shelters from the rain under a rhubarb leaf. Two ducklings push a walnut shell across a puddle with a twig for a mast. On the farm a duck rides in a wheelbarrow of windfall apples, perches on an upturned barrel in the barn, nests in a flowerpot on a doorstep and tugs weed from a trough while a goat watches over the rail.

A duck on its own, or a duck in a place

Worth knowing before you print, because the measurements say something clear. The breed portraits are the quickest sheets here, and among the quickest on the whole site: a duck on plain ground is one smooth body, a bill and two feet, with almost nothing to fill. The lone duckling is the simplest drawing in the collection by a wide margin.

Quick to color, above the grid, keeps that end. These open it:

• Duckling
• Mallard Drake Portrait
• Duck on the Ice

That does not make them a children's set. With so few areas to fill, the time goes into the feathers and the sheen instead, which is exactly what a sharp colored pencil is for. The colored pencil guide compares sets with the greens and browns these need.

The sheets with a whole yard in them

The other end is not the animal, it is the setting. Every dense sheet here is a place: jetty planks, a farmyard of barns and hens, a duck house with its ramp and wire run, a doorstep of boots and brooms, an orchard with a ladder against the tree. Lots of detail gathers them:

• Cayuga Duck Preening
• Duck in the Farmyard
• The Duck House

What color is each duck?

This is where naming the breeds pays off, because each one has a real answer.

• Mallard drake: a bottle green head, a thin white collar, a chestnut brown breast and a gray body, with a blue patch edged in white on the wing and a yellow bill. The hen is mottled brown all over.
• Pekin: pure white, so leave the paper bare and color only the bill and feet, which are bright orange. It is the fastest page here to finish well.
• Indian Runner: fawn, white or chocolate, all one tone, with the upright stance doing the work.
• Wood duck: the showiest of them. A green and purple head with white stripes running back from the bill, a red eye, a chestnut breast spotted with white and buff flanks.
• Muscovy: black and white with red bumpy skin around the face, which is what makes it unmistakable.
• Cayuga: black, but with a beetle green sheen. Lay down black, then pass green lightly over the back and wings.
• Khaki Campbell: khaki brown throughout, the drake with a darker bronze head.
• Rouen: colored exactly like a mallard, only bigger and heavier in the body.
• Call duck and crested duck: usually white or white and gray, with the pompom left pale.

Two details finish any duck whatever the breed. Webbed feet and bills run from orange through to slate gray, and picking one and keeping it on both looks right. And a duck on water sits with a clean waterline: color the body down to that line and leave the water a different tone, and the bird will look like it is floating rather than standing in a puddle.

Ducklings, and the first pages for a small child

The duckling sheets are the way in for a three or four year old. The single duckling is one round body, a small bill and two oversized feet, with nothing behind it at all. The hatching duckling, the walnut shell boat and the line of ducklings chasing a garden hose towards a sprinkler are barely busier, and all of them are things a small child can name out loud, which is what keeps them at the table.

Yellow is the obvious choice and it is the right one for a farm duckling, but wild mallard ducklings are brown and cream with a dark stripe through the eye, so both answers are true.

Ducks through the year

The collection runs across the seasons, so a set can match the month. There is a duck skidding to a stop on a frozen puddle with the cracks running out under its feet, another in a knitted scarf on a snowy bank with a robin on the fence post, ducks paddling around a floating pumpkin in an autumn pond, and a duck standing in a barrow of windfall apples. Spring belongs to the hatching egg and the hen with her six.

More of the same yard is in the farm coloring pages, the pond in spring is in the spring coloring pages, and ducklings turn up again among the Easter coloring pages. What lives under the same pond, carp and pike among the reeds, is in the fish coloring pages.

Use Add to pack below any drawing, then print the whole selection as a single PDF. Your picks stay in the browser from one collection to the next, so sheets from the animal coloring pages can go in the same print.

Each drawing is a free PDF at 300 dpi, carrying no watermark and needing 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 covers paper and settings.