Teddy Bear Holding A Giant Red Heart Coloring Page

A teddy bear sits holding a heart almost as big as he is. Every part of him is worked over with pattern: swirls and curls run through the fur on his head and body, his ear linings are marked with fine ridges, and the pads of both upturned feet are drawn with separate toes. He has large round eyes with lashes above them and a solid dark nose. The heart he is clutching is left completely plain, a single clean outline, which is the one piece of quiet on the whole sheet. Around all of it runs a thick frame of scrollwork, leaves and open flowers reaching into every corner.

That blank heart is doing real work. It is the only large unbroken area in the drawing and it gives your eye somewhere to rest, so it is worth keeping simple rather than patterning it to match the bear.

This is firmly an adult page. The fur alone runs to hundreds of small enclosed shapes.

The teddy bear is named after Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1902 refused to shoot a bear that had been tied to a tree for him. A cartoon of the refusal ran in the papers, and a Brooklyn shopkeeper put a stuffed bear in his window labeled Teddy's bear.