A polar bear in profile on the edge of the ice, with stars above it and broken floes in the water below. There is a second, plainer bear for younger children. Two drawings, one to a sheet, at three line weights on A4 or US Letter.
Colouring an animal that is already white
Hand a six year old a polar bear and a box of crayons and one of two things happens: the bear comes out orange, or the sheet gets abandoned. That is not the child being awkward. A white animal on white paper genuinely has nothing to do, and most polar bear sheets pretend otherwise.
This drawing answers it by putting the work around the bear. The sky above holds a scatter of six pointed stars, the bear stands on a long ice edge that runs the width of the page, and below that line there are two large floes with a smaller one between them and a few short dashes for open water. Colour the night deep blue, the ice pale and the water darker, and the bear reads as white because everything round it is not.
What the bear itself gives you
There is more on it than the outline suggests. A line falls from the shoulder and another from the haunch, which cuts the body into three panels that can take three different shades of grey. The far front leg and the far back leg are drawn inside the body shape rather than behind it, so they can be shaded a step darker and the bear stops looking flat. The muzzle, the small round ear, the ringed eye and the claw marks at each foot are the only places a darker pencil has to go.
That is the honest way to colour the animal. A real polar bear against snow is a slightly warmer, greyer white than the snow, with shadow under the belly and along the legs furthest from you, and this drawing is divided up so a child can do exactly that with one grey pencil and some pressure.
The second drawing, and the controls
The plainer bear drops the interior lines and keeps a bold silhouette, which is the version for a nursery group or for anyone who wants a shape to cut out. Pick either one from the Picture buttons above the paper.
Redraw changes how many stars are in the sky and where they sit, so two sheets printed a minute apart are not identical. Line weight runs Chunky, Standard and Fine, and both paper sizes recalculate the margins rather than scaling the drawing down.
Questions
- How do you colour a polar bear if polar bears are white?
- Leave the bear as paper and colour what is around it. The sky, the ice shelf under its feet and the water below are all separate areas on the sheet, and once they are filled the bear reads as white. A grey pencil under the belly and on the far legs does the rest.
- How many polar bear colouring pages are there?
- Two drawings: a bear in profile on the ice with stars above and floes below, and a plainer bear with the interior lines left out. Both print at three line weights and on A4 or US Letter.
- Which one is right for a preschooler?
- The plainer bear with the line weight set to Chunky. It is a bold silhouette with very little inside it, so there is nothing small enough to get lost under a thick crayon, and it cuts out cleanly if you want it on card.
- Does anything change when I press Redraw?
- The stars do. The number of them and where they sit in the sky are drawn again each time, so a class can end up with a wall of bears under different skies rather than thirty copies of one sheet.