Rainbow Coloring Pages

A rainbow is the one subject where the coloring is decided in advance, and that turns out to be the point. A child who knows the order can finish a sheet confidently, and a child who does not learns it in one page. These free printable rainbow coloring pages are built around that: wide bands drawn as separate strips, so nothing has to be judged, only filled.

Much of the collection has an actual arc in it. It rises over a red barn and a post fence, comes down into a lake and repeats upside down in the water, stands behind a lighthouse while waves break on the rocks, turns into a staircase climbing above a path between fir trees, and ends in a pot of coins in the grass.

The rest have no arc at all, and those are the sheets teachers tend to like more. A row of books on two shelves. An open box of wax crayons. Five paint jars and a palette with eight empty wells. Seven tubes hanging from a wind chime. A striped towel and two socks on a washing line. A basket of wool with a fringed scarf trailing out. Each one is already divided into strips, and the child supplies the order.

The order, and the one thing to get right

Red is always on the outside. Then orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, working inwards. That is the whole of it, and it is worth saying once before a child starts rather than after.

• Color each band in one direction, following the curve rather than across it. Streaks that all run the same way stop looking like streaks.
• Work from the outside in, so your hand never rests on a band you have just finished.
• Keep the pressure even and light. A rainbow pressed hard goes waxy, and the next band picks up the color of the last.
• Leave the clouds white. Color the sky around them in pale blue instead.
• The double arc on the barn sheet reverses: violet on the outside of the second, fainter one. Worth pointing out; almost nobody knows it.

Wide bands for small hands

Quick to color above the grid keeps the widest bands and opens on the simplest.

• An arc between two clouds
• An arc mirrored in a mountain lake
• A butterfly on a wide daisy

The arc between two clouds is the sheet to print thirty times for a nursery: three wide bands, two clouds and three birds, and a three-year-old can do it properly.

Rainbow animals and the reason they are here

Several sheets are creatures with banded or patterned bodies: a scaled fish above a coral bed, a chameleon with a tightly curled tail, a macaw with one wing spread, a toucan with a heavy banded bill, a domed jellyfish with eight wavy tentacles, a caterpillar of round segments asleep on a leaf.

None of them are really rainbow-colored in life, and that is fine. They are there because they are already divided into bands and segments, which makes them the same exercise as the arc with a lot more to look at. The fish coloring pages and the ocean coloring pages have the same animals drawn straight.

Suncatchers, and a chart that gets used

Color is the whole subject here, so the useful things to make are the ones that need light behind them.

Color an arc on ordinary copy paper, then rub the back of it with a little cooking oil on a cloth and let it dry. The paper turns translucent, and taped to a window the bands glow. It is an old trick, it takes five minutes, and it is more convincing than any suncatcher kit.

The banded objects have a different use. Print the wind chime, the washing line or the crayon box, and let a child decide the order of the colors before they start rather than following the spectrum. Two sheets colored in two different orders, pinned side by side, is the clearest lesson in what order does that a small child will sit through.

For something that gets used every day: color the arc sheet, cut the bands apart, and glue them as a column on card with a weather word written beside each one. It becomes a chart a child moves a peg down each morning, and it survives because they made it.

And the animals, which are not really rainbow-colored in life, are the ones to laminate: the macaw and the chameleon hold up as place mats far better than a plain arc does.

The nature coloring pages and the spring coloring pages carry the same weather, the flower coloring pages the same palette, and the fish coloring pages the banded bodies.

Why a rainbow is an arc

A rainbow is not an object in the sky, and understanding that explains every odd thing about it.

Sunlight enters a raindrop, bends, reflects off the back of the drop, and bends again on the way out. Different colors bend by slightly different amounts, so they leave at slightly different angles, which is why they separate.

Red always leaves at about 42 degrees from the line between the sun and your eye, violet at about 40. Every drop that happens to sit at that angle sends you red; every drop at 40 sends you violet. All the points at a fixed angle from a line form a circle, which is why a rainbow is curved. You see an arc rather than a full circle because the ground gets in the way; from an aeroplane you can see the whole ring.

This also explains three things children notice. The sun is always behind you when you see one. You can never reach it, because it is an angle rather than a place, and it moves as you do. And two people never see the same rainbow, since each eye receives light from different drops.

The second, fainter bow comes from light reflecting twice inside the drop, which reverses the order, violet outside, red inside.

The busiest pages in the set

Press Lots of detail for everything at the other end, starting with the most packed.

• A row of beach huts and deckchairs
• A basket of wool with a scarf
• A washing line above a basket

The reef, the macaw and the flowered garden arch are the ones to keep for an evening. A rainbow palette is unforgiving at that scale, so it helps to pick a single band of the spectrum for each page: all the warms on one, all the cools on another. The flower coloring pages and the nature coloring pages are the nearest neighbors.

Each sheet is a free A4 PDF at 300 dpi, with no sign-up. Print at 100 % scale on A4, or choose "fit to page" on US Letter; the printing guide explains the difference. Press Add to pack under the sheets you want and print them together as one PDF.