Elephant Coloring Pages

An elephant is the easiest big animal for a child to draw and one of the most satisfying to color: a huge, simple shape, a trunk that can do anything, and ears like two maps. These elephant coloring pages follow elephants through an ordinary day on the savanna, and then dress them up for a festival and fill them with pattern.

The savanna comes first. An elephant stands in tall grass under acacia trees, sprays water over its back at a waterhole, throws a cloud of dust over itself, reaches high into a tree for a branch, carries a bundle of branches down a dusty track, crosses a river, scratches its side against a rough trunk and stands still in the pouring rain. A herd walks in a line from the biggest to the smallest, and another drinks in a circle around a waterhole seen from above. Two elephants twine their trunks in greeting, one sleeps under a baobab with birds on its back, and one watches from a ridge over a whole valley.

The baby elephants get the most pages: a calf rolling in the mud with its legs in the air, a calf chasing egrets, a calf splashing in a puddle while its mother watches, a calf curling its trunk around a fruit, a calf meeting a warthog nose to nose, two calves play-wrestling, three asleep in a pile, and a mother with her calf close beside her. A cute chibi elephant holds a flower in its trunk, one wears a scarf in the snow, and small birds and a butterfly rest on a tusk and a trunk. The decorative pages finish the set: a decorated Indian elephant in a patterned blanket, an elephant in marigold garlands under festival bunting, an elephant mandala of paisley and lotus, a head with mandala ears, a zentangle elephant, a repeating pattern of little elephants and paisley, and a border of elephants and lotus flowers around an open page.

African or Asian?

There are two kinds of elephant, and the pages show both. The African elephant, on the savanna pages, has huge ears shaped a little like the map of Africa, a back that dips in the middle, and two finger-like tips at the end of its trunk. The Asian elephant, the one dressed for festivals, has smaller rounded ears, a rounded or humped back, a domed head with two bumps, and only one tip on its trunk. Only some Asian males grow tusks, while most African elephants of both sexes have them.

Show a child the savanna elephant and the festival elephant side by side and let them find the differences: ears, back, head. It is a better lesson than a chart.

Gray is more than one color

Real elephants are gray, but rarely the flat gray of a crayon. Their skin picks up the color of the ground they bathe in, so savanna elephants are often reddish brown from dust and dark after mud. For a page that looks real, color the elephant in a light gray first, then add a warm brown over the legs and belly where mud and dust collect, and a darker gray in the deep wrinkles and under the ears. The wrinkles are drawn in on these pages; coloring along them rather than across them keeps them visible.

The decorated pages are the opposite: in India, elephants at festivals are painted and dressed in bright blankets, and the colors are meant to be bold. Orange and yellow marigolds, red and gold blankets, and painted patterns in white, pink and blue are all traditional.

Calves for toddlers, patterns for grown-ups

Most of this collection is quick to color: an elephant is one big shape, and many pages keep it large with only a little grass or water around it, which suits a child of three or four. Quick to color, above the grid, starts with:

• Bird perched on an elephant tusk
• Elephant in the rain
• Elephant dust bath

The decorated and patterned pages are for older children and adults, where every panel of the blanket and every petal of the mandala is its own shape. Lots of detail opens on:

• Elephant scratching on a tree
• Elephant head with mandala ears
• Elephant mandala with paisley and lotus

A herd for the classroom wall

Elephants live in families led by the oldest female, the matriarch, who remembers where the water is in a dry year, sometimes decades later. That is where the saying about an elephant never forgetting comes from, and it is close to true. A herd is her daughters, her granddaughters and their calves; grown males leave and live on their own.

That makes a good class project. Give each child a different elephant page, color them, cut them out, and line them up along a wall from the biggest to the smallest, with the matriarch at the front, the way the herd page shows. The calves go in the middle, where a real herd keeps them safe.

A birthday card and a good luck page

The elephant is a symbol of good luck in several cultures, especially with its trunk raised, and the decorated elephant is linked to Ganesh, the elephant-headed god celebrated at the Ganesh Chaturthi festival. The chibi elephant with its flower, folded onto a card, makes a gentle birthday or good luck card, and the elephant border has room in the middle for a message.

Printing a set of elephants

These are free PDFs drawn on A4 at 300 dpi. On A4, print at 100 %; on US Letter, choose "fit to page", which makes the drawing about six percent smaller without cutting off a trunk. The printing guide shows where to find it. Add to pack under several pages prints them as one file. The zoo coloring pages and the lion coloring pages share the savanna, and the mandala coloring pages have more patterns like the decorated elephants.