Snowman Coloring Pages

A snowman has a life of its own: it is rolled, dressed, visited, and then one warm morning it is gone. These snowman coloring pages follow that whole winter, from the first snowball to the puddle in spring.

The building comes first. Two children push a snowball bigger than they are across the garden, leaving a track behind. Two more press buttons from a tin onto a snowman with a basket of scarves beside them, a bear and a fox work together with little trowels, and a snowman shovels his own brick path. Then the snowmen themselves, dressed every way: the classic snowman with a striped scarf and a carrot nose, a top hat with holly, a knitted hat and mittens, earmuffs and a snowflake sweater, a chunky knitted scarf, a pinecone wreath, a pot on his head with a wooden spoon, and a pirate in a paper hat and eyepatch beside a treasure chest.

Snowmen have company here. One hugs a puppy, another holds out a carrot to a bunny, a robin perches on a stick arm, sparrows crowd a bird feeder, penguins waddle past in a line, and a cat sleeps in the coils of a scarf. There is a snowman family of three, a snowman couple under paper stars, three snowmen behind a snow fort, and snowmen watching children skate on a frozen pond and slide down a sledding hill. One stands in the wind, one wears icicles, one holds a mug of cocoa, one waits by a snowy mailbox, one has lost his kite in a tree, and one stands under the northern lights. A snowman in a snow globe, a cute chubby snowman with a lantern, a snowman mandala of patterned scarves, and a border of snowmen and snowflakes finish the set, along with the page nobody wants to color first: the snowman melting in spring, crocuses coming up around the puddle.

The science of a good snowman

Not every snow makes a snowman. The best is wet, sticky snow, which falls when the temperature is just around freezing: the flakes are partly melted, and the water between them works like glue. Very cold snow is powdery and falls apart in the hand, however hard you press it. That is why the best snowman days often come right after a snowfall, as the air warms.

The three balls are not only tradition. A bigger ball at the bottom keeps the weight low and stops the snowman from tipping, and a slightly smaller middle and a smaller head make him stable. The children rolling the giant snowball are doing it the right way: rolling gathers more snow and packs it at the same time.

White is not the only color for snow

A snowman on a white page is already finished, and that is the trap. Leave the snow white, but give it shape with a very pale blue or lavender on the side away from the light and under each ball. That little bit of shadow turns flat circles into round snow.

Then let the accessories carry the color: a red or green scarf, a black hat, an orange carrot nose, brown stick arms, black coal eyes and buttons. The sky can be a pale winter blue for daytime or a deep navy for the northern lights page, where the lights themselves are green, pink and purple ribbons.

Three circles for small hands, busy hills for big ones

Most snowman pages are quick to color: three big circles, a hat and a scarf, which is exactly what a child of three or four can finish. Quick to color, above the grid, begins with:

• Snowman in a top hat with holly
• Snowman with a pinecone wreath
• Snowman with a pot on his head

The detailed pages are the busy winter scenes, the sledding hill, the children decorating a snowman, and the mandala of patterned scarves. Lots of detail opens on:

• Snowman mandala of scarves
• Children decorating a snowman
• Snowman on a sledding hill

Snowmen around the world

Building snowmen is old and almost universal. One of the earliest pictures of a snowman is in a book of hours from 1380, and in the winter of 1511 the people of Brussels built more than a hundred snow figures across the city. In Japan the traditional yukidaruma has only two balls, not three, and in Finland and Sweden the word for snowman is simply "snow-man" as in English. A child who builds a two-ball snowman is building it the Japanese way, and the cute chubby snowman with the lantern on these pages is close to one.

A snowman to keep after the snow melts

Real snowmen do not last, which makes the paper ones worth keeping. Color the snowman your family built this year to match, the same hat and the same scarf, date the page and add it to a folder: in a few winters it becomes a record of every snowman the children made. For a classroom, the border of snowmen and snowflakes has an open oval in the middle for a winter poem or a list of words that describe snow.

And if a winter passes with no snow at all, which happens, a stack of these pages and a pair of scissors makes a paper snowman family for the window instead.

Printing a snowman stack

Each snowman downloads free as a 300 dpi PDF for A4 paper. A4 prints at actual size; US Letter needs "fit to page", about six percent smaller and not a button lost. The printing guide walks through the dialog. Line up several with Add to pack and print them in one go. The winter coloring pages, Christmas coloring pages and gingerbread coloring pages cover the rest of the season.