Easter Coloring Pages

Easter weekend has a lot of waiting in it: for the egg hunt to start, for lunch, for the cousins to arrive, for the rain to stop so the hunt can start. A pile of paper handles the waiting. These free printable Easter coloring pages are mostly scenes rather than single shapes, so there is something to find in each one: a bunny riding a bicycle with eggs in the front basket, a chick pulling a toy wagon with a ladybug riding on top, three bunnies at a craft table with a bowl of dye, a mother duck walking her ducklings across a wooden bridge.

The eggs have their own pages too. One large egg is banded with zigzags, dots and flowers, another is covered in hearts and leaves, and a row of tall eggs gives each one a different pattern. Around them are the Easter bunny with a paintbrush, a lamb in a bow tie, a hen and her chick in the barn, an egg tree beside a garden bench, a woodland race with a hedgehog and a bear, and a few pages for Holy Week.

Which pages suit a four-year-old?

Press Quick to color above the grid and only the roomy sheets stay, easiest first.

• Three chicks in a flower pot

Most of this set is busier than that, and it helps to know before printing a pile for a preschool table. Past the quick band, the pages with one clear subject work well from about five: the chick hatching in its straw nest, the bunny peeking out of an egg turned into a little house, the egg carton, and the chick with its wagon. Children around seven and up take the garden scenes, like the egg hunt behind the bushes or the bunny and the chick in the cabbage patch, where there is always one more egg hidden in the leaves.

Easter coloring pages for adults

Lots of detail keeps the other end, where the page fills with small areas: basket weave, flower borders, patterns inside patterns. The densest open the band.

• An Easter egg with hearts and leaves
• A bunny family Easter picnic
• An Easter basket with a bow on the handle

The egg with hearts and leaves works like a small mandala and takes an evening with sharp pencils, since markers blur in its tightest corners (the colored pencil guide compares sets). The bunny family picnic, the wreath of eggs tied with a bow and the bunny in a floral teacup are the other slow ones. For more of that quiet, homey mood outside the holiday, the cozy coloring pages carry on where these stop.

How do you make a paper egg look finished?

Pick three colors and repeat them band by band instead of using every pencil in the box: a zigzag egg in pink, yellow and pale green looks planned, while a rainbow of twelve looks spotted. Pastels come out best with light pressure, and a second layer on top evens out the streaks. Leave one narrow band uncolored and it reads as a stripe of white paint.

On the bunnies, leave the fur as bare paper and shade only the inside of the ears in pink. White pencil on white paper does almost nothing, so the white of a lamb or a lily comes from coloring the grass and the sky around it. Lilies need only a yellow line down the middle of each petal and orange tips on the stamens.

A Holy Week sequence for Sunday school

Four pages follow the story in order, which makes them easy to hand out one per session or all at once for a church craft table. First, children wave palm branches as a donkey is led down a village street on Palm Sunday. Then a wooden cross stands on a hill wrapped in lilies, and a lamb sleeps beside a cross while a dove flies over. Last, the empty tomb at sunrise, with the round stone rolled away. The shapes are plain and the lines are thick, so a class of mixed ages can color them together. Palm fronds are green, the robes can be any soft color, and the sunrise behind the tomb is the place for yellow and orange.

Eggs, rabbits and the reason they go together

The two symbols on most of these pages come from different places and met relatively recently.

Eggs are the older of the two and the connection is straightforward: they were forbidden during the forty days of Lent, so they piled up, and the ones laid in that period were hard-boiled and kept. Decorating them was a way of marking the end of the fast. In Eastern Europe the decoration became an art form of its own, with wax-resist dyeing producing the intricate patterns the pattern sheets here borrow from.

The rabbit arrives from German folklore, where a hare judged whether children had been good and laid colored eggs for the ones who had. German settlers took the story to America in the 1700s, and it grew into the rabbit that now delivers chocolate.

Chicks, lambs and daffodils need no explanation beyond the season: they are simply what is happening outside in the northern spring, which is also why Easter looks so odd in the southern hemisphere, where it falls in autumn.

For coloring the egg sheets: traditional decorated eggs use a small number of colors repeated in bands, not a different color per shape. Three colors around an egg looks authentic. Twelve looks like a pile of sweets.

Egg hunts, cards and a basket of pages

The large single eggs are drawn with a clean outer line and nothing behind them, so they cut out easily. Print a few on 160 gsm card, color them, cut around the outline and hide them for a paper egg hunt indoors when it rains, or punch a hole at the top and hang them from a branch in a vase. Copy paper curls within a day, card does not.

Fold an A4 sheet in half twice (a Letter sheet folds the same way) and a small egg or the bunny face in its flower egg becomes a card that fits a standard envelope. For Easter lunch, a colored page in a clear plastic sleeve is a place mat for the kids' table.

Press Add to pack under any drawing to set it aside, then print everything you picked as one PDF. Eight or ten sheets stapled together make an Easter coloring book to tuck into a basket next to the chocolate, and the pack follows you across collections, so the flower coloring pages and a few animal pages can go in the same print.

A4 sheets: print at 100 % scale, or "fit to page" on US Letter so the edges survive, with draft mode off. The printing guide has the rest. Every sheet is a free 300 dpi PDF, and the holiday coloring pages carry the calendar on from spring.