Fish Coloring Pages

A fish drawn on empty paper is a shape with a fin. Put it in water and there is a whole page to color: gravel, weed, lily pads, the rings where it breaks the surface. These free printable fish coloring pages are drawn that way, and the water is usually the part that takes the longest.

The fish themselves are real ones. The koi has its patches, the trout its spots, the pike its long jaw, the catfish its barbels. A child who keeps fish will recognize the tetras, the guppies and the angelfish; a child who fishes with a parent will recognize the perch among sunken branches and the salmon coming up over the lip of a waterfall.

From a bowl to a river, by age

• Toddlers: the goldfish bowl and the betta. One fish, big shapes.
• Preschool: the guppies, the two fantails, the fish bowl held in two hands.
• School age: the aquarium scenes and the river fish, where the plants and the stones give the page a background.
• Adults: the mandala, the shoal, the fishmonger slab.

Press Quick to color above the grid: it keeps the easiest sheets and leads with the quickest.

• A salmon leaping a waterfall
• Four koi circling a stone basin
• A feed tray drying by the tap

Colors that make a fish look wet

• One dark edge per scale. Color the fish evenly, then darken the bottom edge of each scale. That single step does more than any amount of shading.
• Leave a white stripe along the back. Bare paper reads as the light on a wet fish.
• Goldfish: two oranges, the darker one in the fin creases. Koi: leave whole patches white and color the rest orange and black. Trout: olive on the back, pale below, and spots in a darker brown ringed with a dot of red.
• Water: color it pale and unevenly, in horizontal strokes, and leave the ripples as bare paper. Fully colored water swallows the fish.
• Fins are see-through. Use the palest version of the body color and let the rays show as lines.

For a class topic on fish and water

The aquarium sheets carry a small lesson in them: the tank with the net, the bucket and the scrubbing brush, and the feed tray drying by the tap, are about looking after fish rather than just owning them. The river sheets sort by habitat, which is the way a topic usually runs: still water for the carp and the tench, fast water for the trout, the bottom for the catfish and the sturgeon.

A shoal sheet is also the quickest way to get a whole class working on one thing. Sixteen fish, one per child in a mixed group, colored on separate copies and pinned up together.

A wall of water, built from finished sheets

A single colored fish on a fridge is a drawing. Thirty of them overlapping on one wall is an aquarium, and building it is the part children remember.

Cut the fish out of their pages once they are colored, keeping the fins intact, and mount them on a large sheet of blue paper at different heights. Add the weed and the coral from the reef sheets, cut out separately and glued along the bottom, and leave gaps: real water is mostly empty. Hung with a few threads so the fish stand a centimetre off the backing, the whole thing moves when someone walks past.

Smaller versions of the same idea work at home. A colored fish taped inside a jam jar, seen through the glass, looks like it is swimming. Two fish glued back to back and hung from a thread turn as the heating comes on.

And if you keep real fish, the feed tray sheet and the tank-cleaning sheet are worth printing for a different reason: they are the two jobs children forget, and a colored reminder taped inside the cupboard door is read more often than a spoken one.

For the sea rather than the tank, the ocean coloring pages and the turtle coloring pages cut out just as well, and the shark coloring pages give the wall something with teeth.

How a fish is built

The parts on these drawings are not decoration, and naming them makes the page easier to color well.

The fins do separate jobs. The dorsal along the back stops the fish rolling. The caudal at the tail pushes it forward, and its shape tells you the lifestyle: a deeply forked tail belongs to a fast open-water fish, a broad rounded one to a fish that darts and stops. Pectoral fins at the sides are the brakes and steering. Color the fin rays as lines rather than filling the fin flat, and leave the membrane between them pale: real fins are semi-transparent.

The lateral line is the faint line running from gill to tail on almost every fish here. It is a sense organ that detects movement and pressure in the water, which is how a shoal turns at once without colliding.

Gills take oxygen from water, and the bony flap covering them is the operculum. Barbels, the whiskers on a catfish or a carp, are taste and touch organs for finding food in mud.

And the scales: they overlap backwards like roof tiles, they grow with the fish, and in many species they carry growth rings that can be read like a tree's.

For grown-ups: the densest pages in the set

Press Lots of detail for the opposite end. It leads with the page carrying the most separate shapes.

• A fish filled with scales and spirals
• A koi seen from above
• Three guppies above the gravel

The mandala repeats eight fish nose to nose around a center of bubbles, and the big fish made of small fish has dozens of separate bodies inside one outline. Both reward a restricted palette: pick three colors, repeat them in rotation, and the pattern holds together. For more of that kind of page, the mandala coloring pages are next door.

The sheets are A4 PDFs at 300 dpi. Print at 100 % scale on A4, or "fit to page" on US Letter. The printing guide has the settings. Press Add to pack under each sheet to print several as one file, and the ocean coloring pages take the same pack if you want the sea as well as the river.