Mandala Coloring Pages

Every design among the free mandala coloring pages below turns around a single center, whether it holds a lotus, two koi circling a lily pad or a six-point star of Celtic knotwork. Start there, work outward ring by ring, and the page decides the next step for you. Each design downloads as a PDF, from open rosettes a child can finish to full page mandalas with no empty space left.

The designs fall into a few families:

• Flower mandalas: a lotus, a sunflower with a woven lattice center, a many-petalled flower around a solid black heart, a wreath of cherry blossoms.
• Animal mandalas: an owl in feathered petals, a moth on a lotus, a hedgehog in leaves, seahorses around a heart, a phoenix with flaming wings.
• Geometry and knotwork: a faceted star like cut glass, meshed cogwheels, a twelve-point star of zigzag bands, Celtic interlace woven through leaves.
• Windows and lace: a stained glass rose window, a sunburst wheel window, a layered lace doily.
• Sun, moon and sea: a crescent moon inside a flaming sun, a sun clock, a crab on a compass rose, a ring of seashells around coral.
• Seasonal rings: a patterned pumpkin, a six-armed snowflake, a tree of life with spreading roots.

What a mandala is, from Tibetan sand to rose windows

Mandala is a Sanskrit word for circle. In Hindu and Buddhist traditions it is a sacred diagram, a picture of the universe arranged around a center, and it is used as a support for meditation.

The best known are the Tibetan sand mandalas. Monks lay colored sand grain by grain over several days, then sweep the finished design away and pour the sand into running water, a lesson in impermanence.

The same circular order shows up far from Asia. Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres and Notre-Dame de Paris have huge rose windows, and the stained glass rose window and wheel window here borrow that idea. In the twentieth century the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung drew mandalas almost daily for a time and wrote about them as images of the whole self, which helped bring the word into everyday use in the West.

Flower mandala coloring pages

The flower mandalas are the gentlest way in, since a petal is a shape everyone knows how to color. Some to try:

• The lotus among stacked pointed petals, each layer ringed with small fans.
• The sunflower with a woven lattice center, a quick one with big petals.
• The many-petalled flower whose petals radiate from a solid black center dotted with seed heads.
• The daisy on a honeycomb, where the hexagons around the flower take a pale gold.
• The flower ringed by mushrooms and fern fronds, arranged like a star.

Shade each petal from dark at the base to light at the tip with colored pencils, and a flat ring starts to look like it opens. Flowers drawn as they grow, stems and all, are in the flower coloring pages. A wreath of cherry blossoms suits April, next to the spring coloring pages.

Animal mandalas: owls, koi, seahorses and a phoenix

Some people find pure pattern too abstract. An animal mandala gives the eye something to hold onto while the rings carry the pattern around it:

• An owl face surrounded by layers of feathered petals, a cousin of the birds on our owl coloring pages.
• An octopus with eight spiral tentacles, quick to fill. The octopus coloring pages have more.
• A turtle shell of hexagons on a honeycomb background, beside the turtle coloring pages.
• A butterfly on a lace mandala, and a dragonfly resting on a spider web. More wings wait on the butterfly coloring pages.
• Two koi circling a lily pad, six bees around a honeycomb, a chameleon with a curled tail, a hummingbird in a wreath of flowers.

The peacock sits in a medallion with its tail spread into rings of eyed feathers, and a separate fan of peacock feathers fills another sheet. Other collections have animal mandalas of their own: a panda face in a spray of bamboo in the panda coloring pages, and a koala ringed by pointed leaves in the koala coloring pages.

Coloring a mandala ring by ring

A few habits make the difference between a page that hangs together and one that looks spotty:

1. Count the wedges. A six-fold mandala repeats six times around the center, an eight-fold eight times. Pick a number of colors that divides into it, and every ring closes cleanly.
2. Start at the center. The colors in the middle set the scheme, and your hand rests on paper you have not colored yet, so nothing smudges.
3. Repeat two colors plus one accent from ring to ring rather than using the whole box.
4. Watch light and dark. When a ring looks wrong, it usually has the same lightness as its neighbor. Make one of them paler.

Warm center, cool edge

On the sun and moon pages, yellow and orange in the middle with blue and violet toward the rim gives the disc a glow. The crescent moon inside the flaming sun and the six-point star holding both are made for that trick.

Markers or pencils for mandala art

Fine-tip markers fill the mosaic tiles, the faceted star and the fish scales flat and clean. Colored pencils suit petals and feathers. Many people mix them, marker for geometry and pencil for anything that curves. The marker guide and the colored pencil guide compare sets.

Simple mandalas for kids and first tries

Not every mandala takes an evening. The octopus, the snowflake, the tree of life, the sun clock and the hot air balloon of triangle panels have big shapes and few rings. They are grouped together by Quick to color, the right place to start a seven-year-old or a nervous beginner:

• Six-armed branching snowflake
• Tree of life
• Clock face in a flaming sun

Any page also gets easier if you color a whole ring in one color instead of each tiny shape, or stop after the center and two rings and come back tomorrow. The patterned pumpkin and the snowflake double as seasonal pages beside the pumpkin coloring pages and winter coloring pages.

Full page mandala art for adults

At the other end are the sheets with hardly a gap: a mosaic of tiny tiles closing into a sunburst, a field of ribbons and stippled scales mirrored on both axes, a crystalline star spreading to every edge. Pick Lots of detail when you want a whole weekend spent on a single design:

• A mosaic closing into a sunburst
• A crystalline star of faceted shards
• A six-petal flower with a beaded rim

Some of these are drawn freehand, and the line wobbles a little: the nested squares with spiral eyes, the star of angular fretwork. That slight unevenness colors warmer than perfect compass work. The adult coloring pages gather this collection with other slow, detailed pages.

Mandalas for the seasons

The woven crown of thorns suits Lent and Holy Week, alongside the cross coloring pages. For February, the heart-shaped mandala of layered petals lives in the Valentine's Day coloring pages.

Mandalas for a symmetry lesson

Teachers use mandalas for quiet time and for math. The field of ribbons and scales, mirrored on both axes, suits a lesson on lines of symmetry: students fold the sheet to find the lines, color one quarter and copy it into the other three. Counting the petals of a rosette leads into rotational symmetry, and the cogwheels meshed edge to edge open a talk about how gears turn each other.

The school supplies mandala of pencils, brushes and rulers, in the teacher coloring pages, makes a good first-day page for the same class.

Printing a mandala so the center stays sharp

The smallest shapes sit in the middle, so switch the printer from draft to best quality. The free PDFs are drawn on A4 at 300 dpi: A4 paper takes them at 100 percent, and Letter paper needs fit to page, or the outer ring loses its edge. Use Add to pack to set aside a week of evening designs, or one per student, and they come out as one download. Our printing guide shows where the quality and scale options hide.

Clubs and classes may print them as often as they like.