Winter Coloring Pages: 60 Free Printable PDFs

The detailed book is the one to sit down with. Its thirty pages are proper landscapes with a foreground, a middle distance and a horizon, and most of them have no character in them at all, which is unusual for us and deliberate here. A frozen stream between boulders with ice collars built up around them. Birches bowed into arches under the weight of the snow. A ski rack on a lodge porch, a woodshed stacked to the roof, a five bar gate with a frost furred spider web strung across it. There is a lot of line work per page and one takes an evening rather than ten minutes.

The cute book is the opposite in every way. Everything is round, everything is thick lined, and almost everything has a face, including the mittens, the skis, the thermos and the snow plough. It is aimed squarely at children who want to finish a page and feel pleased with it, and at adults who find that kind of thing restful, which is a bigger group than people admit.

Adults who colour to unwind almost always want the detailed book. Children under eight almost always want the cute one. If you are printing for a mixed table, print a few of each and let people choose, because the two books look nothing alike and nobody has to compromise.

The detailed book is set out in the cold rather than indoors, and there is not one wreath, bauble or wrapped parcel in it. That was a decision, not an oversight. Winter runs from November to March and most of it has nothing to do with December, so this book covers the long grey middle of it: the mountain hut on the saddle between two peaks, the ice fishing hut sitting out on the lake, the ridge with a wind carved cornice curling along its crest, the blizzard streaming sideways across a fence line.

The animals in it are doing animal things rather than posing. A mountain hare sits up in the drifts with its own tracks trailing behind it. Two ibex stand on a snowy crag. Three swans crowd the last patch of open water in a frozen lake. A heron stands one legged at the edge of a frozen marsh. A fox has its head tilted, listening for something under the snow, which is exactly what a fox does in winter.

These are the pages worth putting on heavier paper, around 120 gsm, if markers are involved. The log walls, the split log ends and the frosted web pack fine lines close together, and thin copy paper lets the ink feather across them.

Where the detailed book is about the landscape, the cute book is about what you do once you are out in it. Bunnies going down a slope on a sled. A penguin on ice skates leaving a curved line on the pond. A hedgehog in an earflap hat with a shovel and a very small heap of shovelled snow. A husky puppy bounding through a drift with snow flying off it. A fox kit rolling on its back with all four paws in the air.

The indoor pages are the ones that get coloured last and kept longest. A jumper drying on a clothes horse in front of a pot bellied stove. Two kittens under one polka dot blanket. A bunny in bed under a quilt with snow at the window. A plate of iced snowflake cookies next to a rolling pin. If you want winter coloring sheets for a quiet afternoon rather than a busy one, print those five.

Ordinary copy paper is completely fine here. Crayons suit these pages better than pencils, since the open areas are large and there is nothing fiddly to stay inside.

Both books have a snowman and they are the only things in either book that come close to a human shape. That is on purpose. We leave people out of every book we draw, so a snowman here is always what a snowman actually is: three stacked snowballs, pebbles for eyes, a carrot, twigs for arms, a scarf and something upturned on top for a hat. No hands, no fingers, no cartoon face.

The detailed version stands in a garden beside a snow topped fence. The cute version has a proper kawaii face, because in that style everything does, and it sits between two little fir trees. If snowmen are the whole reason you are here, there is also a full bold and easy snowman book linked below with thirty more.

The same rule is why you will find scarves, hats and mittens all over both books but never anybody wearing them. They hang on washing lines, they stack up on benches, and the animals borrow them.

Christmas colouring gets used up in three weeks and then the box goes back in the cupboard, which is a shame, because January and February are the months when an indoor project actually earns its keep. Thirty detailed pages at one a night runs from New Year to the start of February.

Colouring the detailed book in order helps, because it moves outward and then back: cabin, lake, trail, high ground, then down through the barn and the woodshed and the washing line to the shoreline and the aurora. By the middle of it the book starts to feel like one place in one long cold season rather than thirty unrelated pictures.

If you want them to hang together as a set, hold yourself to a small palette. Two blues, one warm grey and a single accent colour saved for the cabin windows and the scarves is the version that looks most deliberate, and it stops page twenty looking like a different book to page two.

Each book opens as one winter coloring pages pdf in the reader, so you can print a single page to test a palette or run all thirty at once. Print in portrait at 100% rather than fit to page. Every design already carries a wide margin, so scaling down only shrinks the areas you actually want to colour.

If you are running off a stack for a classroom, print one test sheet first and check the border frame is not being clipped. It is the one thing that goes wrong, and it is much cheaper to find out on sheet one than on sheet thirty.

All 60 of these free winter coloring pages are free to download and print as often as you like, this year and every year after. Nothing here expires and nothing needs an account.