The sailboat
The sailboat: a free printable coloring page, from age 2. A unicorn sitting in a boat with three portholes, its sail raised above the waves.
- Recommended age
- Ages 2 and up · 10 to 15 minutes
- Theme
- On a journey
- Season
- Summer vacation
A unicorn aboard
A unicorn sits in the boat, turned to the left. Her horn is striped with four bands, her ear has a double outline, her closed eye is edged with lashes, and her mane falls along the neck in wavy locks. Behind her, the tail spills over the side, long and curled. The hull is crossed by a horizontal line and pierced with three round portholes. The mast carries a ball at its top and a boom across it; the sail, rounded, takes up the whole upper right quarter. At the bottom, two rows of even waves.
The wind, the sail, the sea
This is the unicorn boat told in full: this time the water is there, and the hull floats on it. There comes an age when the mechanics of things start to matter — why the mast stands straight, what the horizontal bar crossing the sail is for, why there are round holes in the hull. The portholes are the boat’s windows, the ones you watch the sea through from below. The bar across is the boom: it holds the foot of the canvas and swings it round with the wind.
A big sail, a big hull
The sail takes up the whole upper right quarter and the hull the full width of the bottom: two gestures, and the boat is there. That is what puts the sheet within reach of the youngest. The three portholes are barely more than a centimetre across once the page is printed, the locks of the mane overlap, the lashes are three strokes, and the waves at the bottom are narrow bands to follow without going out: those details are earned at about 4, when the hand slows down on its own in front of a small space.
Two blues beat one
The trap here is to do everything in blue: the sea, the sail, the hull — and the page drowns. Suggest instead two blues that never touch — a deep blue for the waves at the bottom, a very pale one for the sail — and let the hull go to another family: red, green, wood. The mane and the tail are the two large free areas of the drawing: that is where the child can put whatever they like, several colors in the same lock included.
A word for the grown-up: have them start with the sail, the largest surface, and keep the three portholes for the very end. Finishing on three small circles is three minutes more, not thirty — and the child ends on a win instead of stalling on the detail.
Coloring pages that go with this one
More pages from the same theme, age or season — the ones you print right after.
