Easter Coloring Pages

Decorated eggs predate the Christian holiday by a long way, dyed ostrich eggs have been recovered from African sites tens of thousands of years old, and the Persian new year has involved painted eggs for millennia. Whatever is being celebrated, the egg is the reason Easter works so well as a coloring subject: it is a blank oval that exists to be patterned. These 15 Easter coloring pages cover bunnies, baskets, egg hunts and nests. Every design downloads as a free printable PDF sized for US Letter paper.

Easter Bunny Carrying a Basket Full of Colored Eggs and Children Hunting for Easter Eggs in a Garden are the two most popular. Decorated Easter Eggs in a Bird's Nest and Easter Basket Overflowing With Flowers and Candy are the best pattern exercises in the set.

The eggs are where a child can be genuinely inventive, and there is a simple rule that makes a row of them look designed rather than random: give each egg one background color and one pattern, stripes, dots, zigzags, flowers, and never more than two colors on a single egg. A dozen eggs following that rule read as a coherent set. A dozen eggs with everything on them read as noise.

The set widens past eggs and rabbits into the rest of the season. Spring Chicks Hatching From Easter Eggs, Ducklings Following Mother Duck by a Pond and Lamb Resting in a Spring Flower Field are the animal pages, and all three sit in a soft yellow-and-green palette that prints well alongside the brighter egg sheets. Easter Parade With Fancy Bonnets and Flowers and Easter Egg Tree Decorated With Colorful Ornaments carry the most repeated small detail. Easter Cross With Lilies and Spring Flowers is the one page aimed squarely at the religious side of the holiday, and Child Coloring Easter Eggs at a Kitchen Table is pleasingly recursive.

Related sets: Bunnies, Spring, Rainbow and Farm Animals.

Chicks belong to Easter as much as eggs and bunnies do. If the hatching chick is the part your child wants, Chicken Coloring Pages has a whole set of them, including a chick coming out of its shell and a hen sitting on a nest of eggs.