Winter Coloring Pages

Search for winter coloring pages in December and almost everything that comes back is Christmas. These are not. There is no tree, no reindeer and no wrapped present anywhere in the set: this is the season itself, which lasts four months and outlives the holiday by a long way. If it is the holiday you want, the Christmas coloring pages are next door and the Santa pages after that.

What is here falls into four groups. The sports take the biggest share: figure skating, speed skating, the ski jump, a four seat bobsleigh in its chute, curling, biathlon, a snowboarder on the halfpipe lip, an ice hockey face off, downhill and cross country, plus the chairlift and the gear left on a bench. The animals that stay out in it: a fox diving nose first into a drift, a rabbit and the line of prints behind it, deer crossing a meadow, a snowy owl on a post, a bear asleep in her den with two cubs, penguins, a polar bear and her cubs on pack ice, a snow leopard on a ledge. The snow you play in: a fort of snow blocks, a snowball thrown from behind a tree, a half built snowman, a row of sledges at the top of a hill. And the places the frost takes over: a waterfall frozen into columns, a chalet balcony hung with icicles, a snowplough clearing a village lane, a canal and a bridge arch gone still.

Which pages a younger child can finish

Nearly half of this set is quick, which is unusual and worth knowing before you print. Quick to color above the grid keeps them: one animal, one big shape, very little behind. The fox in the drift is the simplest page on the site.

• A fox diving nose first into the snow
• A snowboarder above the halfpipe lip
• A rabbit and its tracks in the snow

Those suit a four or five year old with a fat crayon, and they are the ones to hand out first at a table of mixed ages.

Leave the snow alone

The single most useful thing to know about a winter page: do not color the snow. White paper is already snow, and a child who fills it in loses the whole effect. What makes a drift read as a drift is what goes around it.

• Shadows on snow are blue, not gray. A pale blue pencil along the underside of a drift, in a footprint and beneath a sledge is enough to lift the whole page.
• Skies do the work. A pale blue sky, or a warm orange one for late afternoon, makes the white shapes below read as snow rather than as empty paper.
• Pines take two greens, a dark one in the shade under each tier and a lighter one on top, and the snow on the branches stays white.
• The animals are the color. A red fox, a brown deer, a yellow beak on the duck: keep them warm and everything around them stays cold.
• The snow leopard is worth slowing down for. Leave the coat pale, work each rosette as a ring with a darker center, and the tail alone will take twenty minutes.

For an afternoon that has to last

Lots of detail keeps the other end: the rosehip hedge with every berry drawn, the fringe of icicles under a bridge arch, the chalet balcony, the frozen canal. These are the slow ones, and they suit an older child or a parent coloring alongside.

• A rosehip hedge under frost
• Icicles under a bridge arch
• An ice hockey face off

Sharp colored pencils beat markers on these, because the shapes are small and the paper is mostly white. For the same slow work in a warm room instead of a cold one, the cozy coloring pages carry on through the same months.

A whole set of winter sports

Thirteen of these sheets are sports, which makes them useful every four years when the winter games are on and a class suddenly needs one page per event. Skating, skiing, the jump, the bobsleigh, curling, biathlon, snowboard and hockey are all here, each one drawn as the moment the event is recognized by: the sweepers ahead of the stone, the jumper with the skis in a wide V, the face off over the puck.

No sheet carries a name, a number or a flag, so nobody is coloring the wrong country. The bibs and the boards are left plain on purpose, which also means a child can put their own team on them.

Why snow is blue in the shade

Winter pages fail for one reason: people color the snow. Here is what is actually going on, and it makes the sheets much easier.

Snow is white because it reflects almost all the light that hits it, so sunlit snow is bare paper and nothing else. But snow in shadow is not gray, it is blue, because the only light reaching it comes from the blue sky overhead. That single fact turns a flat white page into a landscape: leave the sunlit surfaces alone, and put a pale blue only in the hollows, under the trees and on the shaded side of every drift.

Two more that follow from it. Footprints and ski tracks are blue, not gray, because they are small shadows. And ice is not white at all but takes the color of what is behind it, which is why a frozen pond is darker than the snow on its bank.

Low winter sun explains the rest. It sits near the horizon, so shadows are very long and everything is lit from the side, and the light itself is warm: a winter afternoon is orange-pink on the snow where the sun catches it. Warm light and blue shadow on the same white page is the whole of winter.

The christmas coloring pages take the holidays, and the santa coloring pages the one visitor.

Printing through a long season

Winter pages get printed from the first snow to the thaw, so they are worth keeping. Press Add to pack under each drawing, keep browsing, then print the selection as one PDF. A handful stapled at the corner makes a small book for a car journey or a half term week indoors. The pack stays in your browser between collections, so a few fall pages from the start of the season can go in the same print.

Each drawing is a free printable PDF at 300 dpi, with no watermark and no account. The sheets are A4: print at 100 % on A4 paper, or choose fit to page on US Letter so nothing is cut off. A thatched cottage under deep snow, with a shovel by the porch, is in the house coloring pages, and the edible kind in the gingerbread coloring pages. The printing guide covers paper and settings, and the rest of the seasons are in the nature drawer.