Ocean Coloring Pages

Children who love the sea usually love a particular animal in it, and it is rarely the same one twice: this week the octopus, next week the narwhal. These free printable ocean coloring pages give each of them a page. A mother whale swims beside her calf, a seahorse father carries his babies through the sea grass, three clownfish peek out of an anemone, and a sea otter floats on its back holding a shell. Some of the animals are busy with something only a coloring page would allow: an octopus juggles seashells over a treasure chest, a lobster and a crab share a pot of tea on a rock, and a whale sings while little fish play the violin and drums.

The ocean here is bigger than a reef. In the cold water a narwhal swims between ice floes, a walrus naps on the ice with a puffin next door, and a pod of belugas smiles up at the snow. Farther down, an eel looks out of its rock cave, a sunken ship has turned into a home for an octopus, and at the bottom of the sea an anglerfish hangs its glowing lure among squid and jellyfish.

Which sea animals for a young child?

Above the grid, Quick to color holds back everything fiddly and opens on the simplest page.

• A humpback whale breaching
• A stingray and a flounder by an anchor
• An orca family in the waves

Big sea animals suit small hands, because a whale or a walrus is one large shape with room to scribble inside the line. The sea lion balancing a beach ball, the pufferfish beside a surprised starfish and the narwhal under the ice are good first pages. A little further along, the jellyfish family and the dolphins leaping through a ring of bubbles add long tentacles and splashes, which children around five like to go around one by one.

Ocean coloring pages for adults

Lots of detail keeps the other end, where coral, kelp and sea grass fill the page with small areas. The densest open the band.

• Clownfish in a sea anemone
• A sea otter in a kelp forest
• An octopus reading in a coral library

The clownfish anemone, the kelp forest with its urchins and the coral reef crowded with tropical fish are the slow ones, along with the octopus in its underwater library, where every book on the shelf is its own shape. Some animals are drawn to look like themselves rather than like cartoons: the humpback whale breaching with its throat grooves, the seahorse with ridged segments, the spotted eagle ray seen from above and the jellyfish with frilled tentacles. They have fewer small areas than a reef, but they reward careful shading with sharp colored pencils (the colored pencil guide compares sets).

What color is the ocean, really?

Not one blue. Near the surface, where the sun gets in, the water is turquoise and pale green; deeper down it turns to navy, and in the deep sea page almost black, which is exactly why the anglerfish's lure and the jellyfish stand out when they are left pale. On a busy page, leaving the water white and coloring only the animals often looks cleaner than a solid wash. If you want the water in, use light strokes in one direction and stop before the page is full.

The real animals are more colorful than most people expect. Clownfish are orange with three white bands edged in black, sea otters are dark brown with a paler face, and a narwhal is mottled gray, darker on the back. Belugas are white, so color the icy water around them instead. The orcas come with their black patches already filled in, which leaves the white areas and the waves to color.

The three layers, and what lives in each

The ocean sheets in this collection are drawn from three different places, and telling them apart makes the whole set easier to color.

The sunlit layer, the top two hundred meters, is where nearly everything lives: coral, turtles, dolphins, shoals of fish. There is enough light for plants, so there is color, and this is the part to color brightly.

Below that the twilight zone runs down to about a thousand meters. Light is blue-gray and there is not enough to grow anything. Animals here are red or black, because red looks black in blue light and makes a good hiding color. The narwhal under the ice belongs nearer the surface, but the same pale-and-dark logic applies.

Deeper still is the dark, where the only light is the light animals make themselves. That is what the deep-sea sheet shows. Color the water almost black, leave the glowing parts as bare white paper, and put a faint blue-green halo around each one. It is the only page in the catalogue where leaving most of it dark is the correct answer.

A last detail children like: whales are mammals and must surface to breathe, which is why a whale is nearly always drawn heading up rather than down.

Using ocean pages in a classroom

Sort the pages by depth and hang them in a column on the wall: sea otters, dolphins and the sea lion at the top, whales and rays in the middle, then the eel in its cave, the shipwreck and the anglerfish at the bottom. It shows the ocean's layers without a worksheet. The cold-water pages, with the narwhal, the walrus and the belugas, make a separate polar corner. The top of that column can borrow from the turtle coloring pages and the fish coloring pages, which both stay in the sunlit water where there is still color to see.

Press Add to pack under any drawing to set it aside, then print everything you picked as one PDF. The pack keeps your picks as you move between collections, so the summer coloring pages, with sandcastles, crabs in a rock pool and a sea turtle over a reef, can go in the same print, and so can a few animal coloring pages. Fans of one particular pineapple under the sea will find him in the SpongeBob pages.

The sheets are A4: print at 100 % scale on A4 paper, or choose "fit to page" on US Letter so nothing is cut off, and keep draft mode off so the lines stay black. The printing guide has the rest. Every sheet is a free printable PDF at 300 dpi, and the nature coloring pages hold the other seasons and landscapes.