The owl
The owl: a free printable coloring page, from age 2. Two eyes round as saucers, a heart-shaped mask and a spiral horn on the skull.
- Recommended age
- Ages 2 and up · 10 to 15 minutes
- Theme
- Animals
- Season
- Autumn and rainy days
Two eyes, and the rest around them
On this sheet, two enormous eyes take up almost the whole top of the drawing: complete circles, ringed with a band, with a black pupil and a white highlight. They sit in a heart-shaped mask, drawn with a double line that comes down to a point between them. Under that mask, a small triangular beak. Two pointed tufts stand up on each side of the skull, with a spiral horn between them. The wings hang along the body like two drops, ending in three notches. At the bottom, two rounded feet.
The bird that lives by night
The owl is the bird children associate with night and with the forest. They recognise its call and its way of turning its head almost all the way round without moving its body — the detail that amuses them most. Its eyes do not move in their sockets, which is why it turns its neck. It flies without a sound, thanks to feathers edged with a down that muffles it. And the two tufts taken for ears are not ears at all: they are feathers, and its real ears are hidden.
From age 2, thanks to the eyes
The eyes are so large that they become an area in their own right: a very young child can color the ring around each pupil without difficulty, and gets a result that shows straight away. The body, the wings and the mask are three large expanses closed by a thick outline, to be filled without thinking. Only the beak and the notches of the wings are small — six or seven strokes in all on the whole page. A drawing seen face on, symmetrical, also colors more easily than one in profile.
A dark background changes everything
This is the sheet that gains most from a background. Leave the bird pale and fill all the white space around it in midnight blue or dark violet: the owl leaps out, and the page becomes a night scene. A colored pencil held flat, on the side of the lead, covers the background far faster than a marker and without buckling the paper. Add a few yellow circles in that background and you have stars, and the sheet earns a place on a wall.
A word for the grown-up: bring this sheet out in the evening, just before bed, and talk about what the owl does while children sleep. Coloring a night animal at pajama time settles the end of the day better than any instruction.
Coloring pages that go with this one
More pages from the same theme, age or season — the ones you print right after.
