Panda Coloring Pages

A panda is the easiest animal in the catalogue to color well, and it is worth knowing why before you print. The markings are already black on the page. A child has only the white fur, the bamboo and the background left to fill, which means a finished panda looks right almost however it is done. These free printable panda coloring pages lean on that: big rounded shapes, thick outlines, and the color pushed out into the scene.

The scenes are mostly bamboo and mountain: a panda chewing a cane, one climbing a leaning stem, another eating at the edge of a stony stream. Around those sit the quieter ones, a panda asleep in a fork of the tree, a cub dozing with its chin on the edge of a crate, and a handful that are frankly invented, like the cub sitting inside an oversized teacup.

The fastest sheets in the set

Quick to color above the grid keeps the big open shapes and opens on the simplest of all.

• A panda sitting up with a raised paw
• A panda sliding down a snowy slope
• A close portrait of a panda

A large part of this collection falls into that band, which is unusual, and it is the reason a panda sheet works for a birthday table or a waiting room: a child finishes one and is pleased with it.

Where the color actually goes

• Leave the white fur as bare paper. A white pencil over white paper makes it gray and flat. If you want shape, add the faintest gray only under the chin and along the belly.
• The black is already black. If it prints a little thin, go over it with a soft black pencil rather than a marker, which will bleed into the white.
• Bamboo takes two greens: the paler one on the canes, the darker on the leaves, with a thin line of the dark green in each cane joint.
• Blossom goes pale pink, barely pressed. Heavy pink next to solid black looks like a mistake.
• Backgrounds are where a panda page comes alive: a blue-gray wash of mountains, a warm sky behind the lanterns, the steam over the hot spring left white.

For a class, or a topic on China

The bamboo is the thread: it is food, shelter, a raft, a basket, a ladder and an arch across these sheets, and it is the one plant in the set worth talking about. Several pages carry the rest of the setting without a word of text on them: a tiled stone lantern, paper lanterns drifting across a lake, a courtyard of stacked clay pots, terraces cut into a hillside.

Nothing here has lettering on it, so the sheets work in any language and nothing needs translating before a lesson.

Paper things worth making from a finished panda

Because a panda is already black and white, a finished sheet holds up as decoration in a way most colored drawings do not. It does not clash with anything.

The simplest use is a concertina: fold a colored panda back and forth in narrow strips, pinch one end, and it opens into a fan. Children work out on their own that the panda distorts as it opens, which is half the fun. The blossom sheet and the lantern sheet fan out best.

Cut-outs work too. A panda cut round its outline and stuck to a window faces the street, and because the markings are solid black it still reads from the pavement, unlike most colored paper in a window. Several at different heights up a stairwell look deliberate.

For something that lasts longer, glue a colored panda to a piece of card, cut round it, and tape a lolly stick to the back: a puppet for a child who wants to tell the story rather than look at it. The mother-and-cub sheets make a pair, which is what a puppet show needs.

And if the bamboo interested a child more than the animal, cut the canes out of two or three sheets and build a screen across a shoebox. It is the beginning of a diorama, and the zoo coloring pages will fill it with neighbors.

Why a bear eats bamboo

The giant panda is a bear with the digestive system of a carnivore, eating a diet that is more than ninety-nine per cent bamboo. Almost everything odd about it follows from that contradiction.

Bamboo is poor food, so a panda must eat twelve to thirty-eight kilos a day and spend up to fourteen hours doing it. It cannot afford to waste energy, which is why pandas move slowly, avoid climbing when they can and do not hibernate: they have no reserves to hibernate on.

The famous thumb is not a thumb. It is an enlarged wrist bone that works as an opposable pad, letting the panda grip a stalk. It evolved for exactly this job and no other bear has one.

As for the markings, the best current explanation splits them: the white body helps in snow, the dark legs and shoulders in shade, and the eye patches and ears are for communication rather than camouflage, with the patches being individually distinctive enough that pandas may recognize each other by them.

Newborn pandas are pink, blind, hairless and about the size of a stick of butter, roughly one nine-hundredth of their mother's weight. The markings appear in the first few weeks.

Panda coloring pages for adults

The button beside it, Lots of detail, reverses the order and starts with the densest.

• A panda cub in a woven basket
• A panda face in a bamboo mandala
• A cub tangled in a ball of wool

The mandala is the one to keep for an evening: a panda face at the center of a symmetrical spray of canes and leaves, with dozens of separate leaf shapes to fill. Sharp pencils rather than markers, and two greens repeated in rotation. The bear coloring pages are the closest relatives in the catalogue, and the mandala coloring pages carry on the pattern work.

Every sheet is a free A4 PDF at 300 dpi. Print at 100 % scale on A4, or choose "fit to page" on US Letter so nothing is cut off; the printing guide covers both. Press Add to pack under each sheet you want and print the selection as one PDF.