Fruit Coloring Pages

This set has two halves that barely overlap, and it is worth knowing which one you want before you print. Half of it is a single fruit on a plain page: an apple with one wedge cut from it, a mango beside its stone, a kiwi cut into rounds. Two of those sheets measure as the emptiest in the whole catalogue. The other half is everything fruit arrives in: a market crate, a greengrocer window, a picnic hamper, a platter laid in rings, an orchard with a ladder against the tree, a vine arbour over a table. Those are among the busiest pages on the site.

The fruits themselves are drawn one by one, in botanical rather than cartoon style, with no faces and nothing smiling. Apple, pear, banana, orange, lemon and lime, watermelon, pineapple, mango, pomegranate, grapes, fig, peach, papaya, kiwi, coconut, dragon fruit, strawberry and raspberry, most of them shown whole beside a cut half so the inside is there to color too. For fruit with a face on it, the food coloring pages are next door and drawn the other way round.

The quick half

Quick to color above the grid keeps the single studies. They are the ones to hand a young child, and they are also the ones to use if you want a page finished in ten minutes: one shape, one cut face, nothing behind.

• An apple with one cut wedge
• A lemon and a lime cut open
• A papaya halved lengthways

They double as a way to teach the shapes. A child who colors the papaya and the kiwi on the same afternoon has looked closely at two things they usually swallow without noticing.

Two tones, and one patch left white

Fruit is where flat coloring shows most, because a real apple is never one red. The fix is simple and works on every page here.

• Two tones of the same color on each fruit: the lighter one on the side facing the light, the darker one along the opposite edge and in the dip around the stalk.
• Leave a small patch white where the light would catch. An uncolored highlight is what makes a lemon look waxy and a plum look polished.
• The cut face is always paler than the skin. Watermelon flesh is lighter than its rind, a fig is paler inside than out, and a peach is almost cream around the stone.
• Seeds and pips take the darkest pencil you have, and they are worth doing last so you do not smudge them.
• Leaves are not all one green. A lighter green along the middle vein and a darker one at the edges is enough.

The busy half

Lots of detail keeps the other end, and there is a lot of it: thirteen sheets, several of them among the densest in the catalogue. The vine arbour, the platter arranged in rings and the basket under a cloth each hold well over a hundred separate areas.

• A pomegranate split open
• A basket of fruit under a cloth
• A vine arbour over a table

One oddity worth pointing out: the pomegranate is a single fruit on a plain page and still lands in this half, because the seeds are drawn one by one. It is the shortest route into the slow work.

What grows when

Eighteen fruits drawn separately make a calendar if you sort them, and sorting them is the part worth doing with a child.

Roughly: strawberries and cherries come first, in early summer. Raspberries, currants and peaches follow through high summer. Apples, pears, plums and grapes are the late-summer and autumn crop, which is why they turn up in harvest pictures. Citrus is the odd one out and arrives in winter, which is why oranges end up in Christmas stockings and why a satsuma once counted as a treat.

Print them, color them, and pin them round a circle divided into four seasons. A child who has done that will tell you, unprompted and slightly indignantly, that strawberries in January came a long way.

The crates and the orchard sheets take the same idea outdoors. And if a fruit gets colored the wrong shade, leave it: a green orange is worth a conversation about why supermarket fruit is all the same color and orchard fruit is not.

Two practical notes for coloring fruit specifically. Leave a patch of bare paper on every round fruit, always on the same side, and the whole set looks lit from one direction. And skins are rarely one color: a real apple is two or three reds with yellow underneath, which is why a single flat red looks like a ball.

The food coloring pages hold the rest of the meal, and the farm coloring pages show where it comes from.

What counts as a fruit

Sorting the sheets in this collection into fruits and vegetables starts an argument that is worth having, because the answer depends on who is asking.

Botanically, a fruit is the part of a plant that holds the seeds. That makes tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, pumpkins, avocados and beans all fruits. It also makes a strawberry not a berry at all: the seeds are on the outside, so it is an aggregate of many tiny fruits, while a banana, a grape and, surprisingly, a tomato are true berries.

In a kitchen, the split is about sugar. Sweet things go in the fruit bowl and savoury things go in the pan, which is why nobody puts a cucumber in a fruit salad regardless of what the botany says.

Both answers are correct in their own context, and that is the useful lesson: the same object can be classified two ways depending on the question.

A few more for the same conversation. A peanut is not a nut but a legume, growing underground. An almond is a seed from inside a fruit related to a peach. And a fig is a cluster of flowers turned inwards on itself.

Printing a set for a kitchen wall

The single studies frame well as a row. Print four or five of the same size, color them in the same palette, and they hang as a set above a kitchen table. On 160 gsm card they take a felt tip without bleeding through.

Press Add to pack under each drawing, keep browsing, then print the selection as one PDF. The pack stays in your browser between collections, so the ice cream pages or a few flower pages can go in the same print.

Each drawing is a free printable PDF at 300 dpi, with no watermark and no account. The sheets are A4: print at 100 % on A4 paper, or choose fit to page on US Letter so nothing is cut off. A for apple, O for orange, P for pear: the fruit turn up again one letter at a time in the letter coloring pages, which is a good second use for a child learning both. The printing guide covers paper and settings, and the rest of the shelf is in the nature drawer.