Panda Coloring Pages

A giant panda is a bear with the digestive system of a carnivore that has committed entirely to eating bamboo, and it has to eat 26 to 84 pounds of it a day to make the arithmetic work. That is roughly 14 hours of chewing, which is why so many panda images show the same seated pose. These 14 panda coloring pages take that as a starting point and add climbing, rolling, sleeping and cherry blossom scenes. Each downloads as a free printable PDF sized for US Letter paper.

Simple sheets keep the outlines thick. Giant Panda Happily Eating Bamboo Shoots, Panda Family Sitting Together in a Bamboo Grove and Adorable Baby Panda With Big Black Eye Patches suit ages three to seven. Detailed sheets add fur and background texture: Red Panda Sitting on a Branch in Autumn Leaves and Panda Surrounded by Cherry Blossoms are longer projects.

A black-and-white animal presents an obvious problem: half the page has no color decision in it. The fix is to treat the white as light gray rather than as bare paper. Shade under the chin, along the belly and behind the legs in the lightest gray you own, and leave only the top of the head and the shoulders untouched. The panda immediately stops looking like a sticker.

Bamboo is the other half of most of these pages and it repays a little attention. A living bamboo culm is a yellow green, not the blue green of a fir, and it is banded: each segment is separated by a raised ring that catches the light. Color the culm in one flat pass, darken a narrow strip just below each ring, and leave the ring itself pale. The leaves are long, narrow and hang in loose sprays rather than sitting flat. Panda Climbing Up a Bamboo Tree and Panda Sitting in a Bamboo Forest Eating give the most stems to practice on, and Twin Pandas Playing Together in the Snow is the one page where the white-on-white problem is the entire exercise.

Related sets: Elephants, Penguins and Forests.