Forest Coloring Pages

A forest is mostly trunks, leaves and light, and that is exactly what makes it good to color: every page is a place to walk into rather than an object to fill. These forest coloring pages go from a single fern leaf to the whole canopy overhead, with a few animals watching from the edges.

The paths come first. One winds between tall pines past a wooden signpost, another runs through an autumn wood to a stile half buried in leaves, one crosses a snowy clearing covered in paw prints, and one stops at a wooden gate before disappearing into the trees. Water runs through many of them: a fallen log bridging a stream, a rustic footbridge over a creek, a fallen tree above a little waterfall, a still pond with lily pads, cattails and a dragonfly, and a waterfall tumbling into a pool of ferns.

People have left their marks too. There is a log cabin with smoke curling from the chimney and a woodpile by the door, a treehouse with a rope ladder and a bucket on a pulley, an arched door in the trunk of a huge tree with a lantern hanging beside it, a stack of firewood under a shelter, a hammock with a backpack at its foot, a rope swing on an old oak, a tent with a washing line and a ring of stones for the fire, a bird hide with binoculars on the ledge, and a picnic table with two mugs waiting.

The small things of the forest floor have their own pages: a ring of spotted toadstools, toadstools and snails around a stump, a basket of mushrooms, shelf fungi climbing a trunk and covering a mossy log, a page of ferns, acorns, pinecones and beetles, and a feather and a pinecone on a flat rock. Then the animals, always a little hidden: a stag at the end of a long avenue of trees, a fox trotting across a clearing, an owl in a hollow, a squirrel on a trunk, a badger at the door of its sett, and bats crossing a full moon. For the patient, one page looks straight up into the leaves, and a bluebell wood and a birch grove fill the sheet from edge to edge.

Which forest page for which age

The simplest pages have one clear subject and plenty of space around it: the owl in its hollow, the fox in the clearing, the rope swing, the feather on the rock. A child of four or five can color them with big crayons and still see what they made. Quick to color, above the grid, begins with:

• Bats and the moon
• Fox in the clearing
• Forest treasures

The dense pages are the ones where the forest itself is the subject, with every leaf and every patch of bark drawn in: the canopy, the bluebell wood, the pine cones on the spruce trees, the mossy log. They suit older children and adults who like to settle in for an evening. Lots of detail begins with:

• Forest canopy
• Stile in autumn
• Bird hide

A forest is not one green

The most common disappointment with a forest page is that everything ends up the same green. Real woods are full of different ones, and a few simple habits make a page look alive:

• Near and far. Trees in the foreground take the darkest, strongest greens and browns. Trees further back get lighter and slightly bluer, which is how distance looks in real air.
• Conifers and broadleaves. Pines and spruces are a deep blue green, almost black in shadow. Oaks, beeches and birches are a warmer, yellower green, and bright lime where the sun comes through.
• Bark is rarely brown. Birch bark is white with dark marks, beech is smooth grey, pine is reddish with deep cracks, and old oak is grey brown. A grey pencil does more for a trunk than a brown one.
• Light from one side. Choose where the sun is and keep the side of each trunk facing it a little lighter. A path colored pale yellow in the middle looks like a patch of sunlight.

The seasons change everything, which makes the same page worth printing twice. The stile page works in orange and red for autumn, the snowy track in white, blue and grey, the bluebell wood in violet and fresh spring green.

Things to look for on a real walk

Many of these pages show things a child can find on an ordinary walk in the woods, and they make a good pair with one. Shelf fungi grow on dead and dying wood, often in steps up a trunk. A ring of toadstools grows where one fungus spreads outward underground. Bluebells carpet old woodland in spring. Tracks show best in fresh snow or soft mud, and a feather or a pinecone is a treasure worth bringing home. Print the forest floor page before a walk and let a child tick off what they find, then color the page with the colors they actually saw.

Printing a walk in the woods

Every page is a free A4 PDF drawn at 300 dpi. A4 prints at full size, and on US Letter "fit to page" shrinks the drawing by about six percent so every branch stays on the paper. The printing guide shows the setting. Add to pack gathers a whole walk into one file. Single trees drawn up close are in the tree coloring pages, tents and campfires in the camping coloring pages, toadstools of every kind in the mushroom coloring pages, and more woodland animals in the deer coloring pages.