Penguin Coloring Pages

Emperor penguins breed through the Antarctic winter, in darkness, at temperatures near minus 40, with the male balancing a single egg on his feet under a fold of skin for around 65 days without eating. Very little in the animal world is a harder story, and it makes the huddle scenes in this set worth more than their cuteness suggests. These 17 penguin coloring pages cover families, chicks, icebergs and underwater hunting, and each downloads as a free printable PDF sized for US Letter paper.

Simple sheets use bold outlines. Penguin Family Cuddled Together in Antarctica, Fluffy Baby Penguin With Soft Downy Feathers and Penguin Wearing a Cozy Knitted Scarf in Snow suit younger children. Detailed sheets carry many more figures and finer texture: Emperor Penguin Colony With Chicks on Feet and March of Penguins Walking in a Long Line are the biggest projects here.

Snow is the technical problem on every one of these sheets. Left white, it merges with the penguins' bellies and the page goes flat. Lay a very pale blue or lilac across the snow, deepen it in the hollows and directly beneath each bird, and keep the penguins' own white areas lighter than the ground. The birds then sit on the snow instead of hovering above it.

The remaining sheets cover the rest of a penguin's year. Baby Penguin Hatching From Its Egg and Penguin Family Huddling Close for Warmth are the breeding-season pages, and the huddle is real behavior rather than sentiment: the birds rotate steadily from the cold outer edge to the warm center and back out again. Penguin Holding a Fish in Its Beak Proudly and Penguin Swimming Gracefully Underwater Hunting Fish are the feeding pages. On the underwater sheet the usual advice reverses: keep the water darkest at the bottom of the page and lightest at the surface, and let a few pale streaks fall through it from above.

More cold-weather line art: Winter, Pandas and Wolves.