I spent last weekend trying to find decent colouring pages for my toddler and ended up making my own. The ones you download from the internet are either too fiddly — tiny intricate patterns designed for adults who want to unwind — or they look like they were drawn by someone who has never actually seen a lion.
So I generated ten simple pictures. Big outlines, thick lines, nothing that requires a magnifying glass and a steady hand. The idea was that a two-year-old could pick them up, scribble inside the lines if they felt like it, or colour the whole page blue and call it done. Both are valid approaches.
The fish came out first. Just a simple shape with a tail, some scales suggested by curves, and a few water lilies at the bottom so it doesn’t look like it’s floating in nothing. Toddlers don’t need context, but I like giving the pictures somewhere to exist.
The duckling has a puddle and some raindrops. I figured a duck belongs near water, and the raindrops give you something extra to colour without making the page busy. The trick with toddler drawings is leaving room — big empty spaces that invite a crayon rather than fighting for territory with detail.
The lion is the one I’m most pleased with. A round face, a mane made of overlapping curves so it looks fluffy without being complicated, and it’s sitting on grass. You could colour the mane yellow or orange or purple — I don’t judge. My toddler coloured it green once and insisted that was the correct lion colour. Fair enough.
The elephant is spraying water from its trunk, which seemed like a good way to make it interesting without adding clutter. A couple of birds in the sky for company. The trunk is the hardest part to get right — it needs to be thick enough to colour easily but curved enough to look like a trunk and not a garden hose. Prompting for that took a few tries.
The teddy bear has a balloon. I know, it’s obvious, but toddlers love balloons and bears together. It’s the kind of picture that makes them point and name things — “bear! balloon!” — which is basically the same as early literacy in my experience.
The kitten is chasing a butterfly. Again, nothing clever, just two things that belong together in a toddler’s understanding of the world. The butterfly wings are big enough to colour separately, which gives you a bit of structure without being restrictive.
The giraffe is the simplest one. Long neck, spots suggested by a few circles, eating leaves from a tree. The legs came out thin because that’s what giraffes look like, but thick enough lines that a crayon could find them.
The sun has a face. I couldn’t help it. Every sun in a toddler’s world has a face — it’s a rule I haven’t questioned. The cloud is puffy, the tree is basic, and together they make a scene that feels complete without needing anything else.
The bunny is eating a carrot. Classic. The ears are long and floppy, the carrot is orange even in line art, and the meadow is just a few blades of grass at the bottom. Nothing fancy, but it works.
The puppy is chasing its own tail, which is what puppies do and what toddlers find endlessly amusing. It came out mid-spin with a bit of motion implied by the position of the legs. The backyard is just a suggestion — a few lines for grass, maybe a fence in the distance if you’re looking closely.
I printed them out and left them on the kitchen table with a box of crayons. Within twenty minutes half of them were coloured, one was partially coloured and then abandoned for a building block, and one is still blank because my toddler decided the page itself was more interesting than anything on it.
That’s also valid.
The whole set is just ten pictures, but that’s all you need. Toddlers don’t work through a colouring book from page one to the last. They grab what catches their eye, colour it however they want, and move on. The ones that sit untouched for weeks will suddenly become the most important thing in the world on a random Tuesday afternoon.
If you want to use these yourself, they’re simple enough that you could adapt them — change the animal, add a friend, turn the fish into a submarine. The point isn’t to get it right. It’s to give someone small something they can make their own.