Animals are the thing children ask for most when they want something to colour, and they are also the hardest thing to find for free without hitting a sign-up wall or a watermark. This page is the whole set: fifty animals, every one of them free, in an A4 PDF for printing and a high-resolution PNG for colouring on a tablet.
How to use them
Click any animal below, then take the PDF if you are printing and the PNG if you are colouring on a screen. There is no account to make and nothing to pay. Print as many copies as you need.
Which ones suit which age
The pages are not all the same difficulty. Animals with big, simple shapes such as the elephant, the whale and the cow have bold outlines and large areas to fill, which suits children who are still learning to stay inside the lines. Pages like the peacock, the butterfly and the seahorse carry much finer detail and are better for older children and for adults who want something absorbing.
Printing them well
Each PDF is laid out for A4, which is what nearly every home printer uses. If your printer is set to US Letter the same file still works, it just leaves a slightly wider margin. Set your printer to its normal quality rather than draft, because draft mode thins the black lines and makes them harder for small hands to follow.
Want an animal that is not here?
If the animal you want is your own, photograph it and turn the photo into a coloring page. That is what the rest of the site does: upload a picture of your dog, your cat, your horse or your rabbit, and you get the same kind of line art back in about ten seconds.
