Tree Coloring Pages

A tree looks simple from a distance and turns out to be the most detailed thing in the landscape once you start drawing it. These tree coloring pages go both ways: portraits of real trees you can name, trees opened up to show how they work, and trees that people live around.

The portraits come first. An oak stands in full leaf and again bare in winter with acorns at its foot, a birch peels its bark in curls, a weeping willow trails its strands over a pond, and a maple drops its leaves into a heap. There are warm-country trees too: a tall coconut palm, palms with a hammock slung between them on the beach, a baobab with its bottle-shaped trunk on cracked ground, an old olive tree split and twisted by a stone wall, a fig tree with roots hanging from its branches, a mangrove on stilt roots with crabs climbing them, and a potted lemon tree on a terrace. A pine carries cones on every tier, a giant sequoia rises off the page above a tiny bench, a bonsai sits in its tray, and a tree bent flat by the wind stands on a headland above the sea.

Then the trees that explain themselves: a tree with the soil cut away to show its roots, a cut log with its growth rings, one tree drawn four times through the seasons, a sapling held up by stakes, an apple tree at harvest with a ladder and crates, an orchard in blossom and a cherry tree covered in flowers. The rest are trees with company: a treehouse with a spiral staircase, a tire swing, a bench built around a trunk, a park tree with a lamp post, an avenue of plane trees, a hollow tree with mushrooms, an owl and a squirrel sharing a trunk, and a tree with a heart in its bark. For a quieter hour there is a family tree with empty frames, a swirling decorative tree, a tree mandala and a tree of life in a circle.

Reading a tree's age in its rings

The cut log is the page to start a conversation. Each ring is one year of growth: a pale, wide band from spring, when the tree grows fast, and a thin dark line from late summer, when it slows down. Count the dark lines from the center out and you have the tree's age. A wide ring means a good year with plenty of rain; a narrow one means drought or a hard winter. Scientists use exactly this, lining up the rings of old beams and trunks to date buildings and to read the weather of centuries ago.

To color it so it reads, alternate two browns from the middle outward, a light one and a darker one, and leave the bark around the edge a different color entirely. A child who counts while coloring has done a science lesson without noticing.

What happens underground

The page with the soil cut away usually surprises people. Roots rarely go straight down like a carrot. Most of them stay near the surface, where the water and air are, and they spread sideways, often further than the branches above them reach. That is why a big tree can lift a sidewalk several steps away from its trunk.

Some trees on these pages have roots in stranger places. The fig drops roots from its branches that thicken into new trunks when they reach the ground, which is how one banyan fig can grow into what looks like a small forest. The mangrove stands on arching stilt roots in salt water that would kill most trees, and the crabs on this page live on them. Coloring the roots a different brown from the trunk makes the underground page much easier to read.

Bark is not brown

A box of crayons has one brown, and real trees almost never match it. Birch bark is chalk white with black marks. Beech and olive are gray, the olive with a silver tint in its leaves too. Plane trees peel in patches of cream, olive green and gray, which is what gives the avenue page its camouflage look. A sequoia is a deep reddish brown, and a palm trunk is a pale sandy gray ringed with darker lines.

For the leaves, use at least two greens: a light one on the top of the crown, where the sun hits, and a darker one underneath and on the shaded side. That single change turns a flat green circle into a tree with depth. On the bare winter oak, try the opposite: leave the sky white and color only the branches, in dark brown or charcoal gray, so the page looks like a real winter morning.

Pages for every age

The collection runs from single trees on open ground to pages where every leaf is separate, in roughly even measure. The quickest are the trees with large, simple shapes, and some are not the ones you would guess: the pine's tiers of branches and the sequoia's trunk leave wide open areas. Quick to color, above the grid, starts with:

• Pine tree with cones
• Giant sequoia trunk with a bench
• One tree through four seasons

The densest pages are the ones with many small leaves or tangled roots, the mangrove, the fig and the tree of life among them. They suit a teenager or an adult with fine-tipped pencils. Lots of detail opens on:

• Bench around a tree trunk
• Maple tree dropping its leaves
• Fig tree with hanging roots

A family tree, a bark rubbing and Arbor Day

The family tree page has empty round frames hanging from its branches. Write a name in each, or glue in small photos cut to size: grandparents in the lowest frames, parents above, the child at the top. It makes a present for a grandparent and a good project for a school assignment on family.

Any of the single-tree pages can be finished outdoors. Hold a sheet of thin paper against a real trunk and rub the side of an unwrapped crayon over it: the bark's pattern appears. Cut the rubbing out and glue it over the trunk on the coloring page, and the tree has real bark.

In the United States, Arbor Day falls on the last Friday of April, the day schools traditionally plant a tree. The sapling held up by its stakes is the page for it, and the four-seasons page makes a good record: color one quarter each season, looking at the same real tree outside the window.

Printing a small forest

Every page is a free PDF on A4 at 300 dpi. On A4, print at 100 %; on US Letter, choose "fit to page" and the tree shrinks by about six percent without losing a branch. The printing guide has screenshots of the setting. Add to pack gathers several pages into one file. The trees go well with the fall coloring pages and the spring coloring pages, and the nature coloring pages hold everything else outdoors.