Fox Coloring Pages

A fox is the one wild animal many children have actually seen, crossing a garden at dusk or trotting along a road at night, and it looks exactly like the fox in their picture books. These fox coloring pages follow it through a whole year, from the den in spring to the snow in winter, with a few foxes that only exist on paper.

The seasons set the scenes. In spring a mother watches her kits tumble at the mouth of the den, two kits play fight while she keeps watch from a rock, one chews a stick while another sleeps, and a fox stands in a meadow of daisies. In summer a fox drinks at a pond beside its own reflection, basks on a warm rock, runs through a wheat field, shakes the water from its coat at a river and climbs a branch toward an empty nest. Autumn brings a fox sniffing along a pumpkin patch, leaping a hedge between the fields, peeking from behind a cluster of mushrooms and standing inside a wreath of oak leaves and acorns. In winter a fox stands on a snowy hillside, dives nose first into a drift, listens for mice under the snow, leads its family across a frozen creek, and an arctic fox sits white against white.

Some pages are just a fox being a fox: sitting in tall grass with its tail around its paws, asleep in a nest of leaves or in a hollow tree, stretching after a nap, trotting along a fence and over a log, watching a beetle crawl across a stone, going cross-eyed at a butterfly on its nose, sitting on a barn roof under a full moon and walking down a village lane at night. For fun, a fox wears a knitted scarf on a sled and another curls up asleep in a teacup. The pattern pages finish the set: a fox face on a mandala, a zentangle fox filled with spirals and scales, a mandala of paw prints, a pattern of fox faces and leaves, and a border of foxes and berries.

The mouse jump

A fox hunting in snow or long grass does something no other hunter in the woods does. It stands still with its head tilted, listening for a mouse moving underneath, then leaps high into the air and dives down nose first, like the fox on the snow page. Scientists who filmed hundreds of these jumps noticed that foxes succeed far more often when they jump facing roughly north-east, and one theory is that they use the Earth's magnetic field to judge the distance to the sound. No one has proven it yet, but the jump itself is easy to watch on a winter's day in open country.

Kits, dens and a white fox

A fox's babies are called kits or cubs, and they are born in spring in a den dug into a bank or under a shed, usually four to six of them. They are born dark brown or gray, with blue eyes, and only turn red after a few weeks. By summer they are playing outside the den, which is when most people spot them.

The arctic fox lives in the far north and has one of the warmest coats of any animal, with fur even on the soles of its feet. It turns pure white in winter, when the land is covered in snow, and brown or gray in summer, when the snow melts.

True fox colors

A red fox is not really red:

• The coat is a warm orange-rust. Start with orange and go over the back and head with a little red-brown.
• The chin, chest and belly are white or cream.
• The legs look as if the fox is wearing black stockings, and the backs of the ears are black too.
• The tail is thick and bushy, the same orange as the back, and almost always ends in a white tip. That tip is the easiest way to tell a fox from a small dog.
• The eyes are amber-yellow.

For the fur, use short strokes in the direction the hair lies rather than filling the shape evenly, and let a little white paper show on the chest.

Quick foxes and detailed scenes

The simplest pages keep one fox large with plenty of space, like the arctic fox and the fox stretching after its nap. Quick to color, above the grid, begins with:

• Arctic fox in the snow
• Fox listening for mice
• Fox stretching after a nap

The densest are the mandala portrait and the scenes full of flowers, leaves and cobblestones. Lots of detail begins with:

• Fox portrait on a mandala
• Fox in a daisy meadow
• Fox in a village lane at night

A fox mask from the portrait page

The mandala portrait and the fox faces on the border make good masks. Color a face, glue it onto thin card, cut around the ears and cut out the two eyes. Punch a small hole at each side and tie on a length of elastic, or tape the mask to a craft stick to hold it up. It makes a quick costume for a woodland play, a school reading of a fox story, or a costume party.

Printing a den full of foxes

Each page is a free PDF drawn on A4 at 300 dpi. A4 prints at full size, and on US Letter "fit to page" shrinks the picture by about six percent so the tail tip stays inside the margin. The printing guide shows the setting. Add to pack gathers several foxes into one file. The woods continue in the deer coloring pages, the squirrel coloring pages and the bear coloring pages, and the autumn scenes pair well with the fall coloring pages.