Winter Coloring Pages (Free Printable PDFs)

What’s in this winter coloring collection

There are 24 original winter coloring pages here, all in one cute, easy style with thick outlines and smiling faces: snowmen and sleds, eight winter animals, cozy things like hot cocoa and a log cabin, and a few calm pattern pages. Zero holiday pages.

Hi, I’m Niks. Every January I go hunting for winter pages, and half of what I find still has Santa on it. Fine in December. By mid-January it feels like leftover wrapping paper. So there’s no Santa, menorah or party hat anywhere in these winter coloring pages, which also makes them easy to use in classrooms that skip holidays. Print one page or all 24 in a single PDF.

Four kinds of winter coloring pages

The page a kid wants on a snow day isn’t the one they want at bedtime, so I sorted the set into four groups. Every page sits in exactly one.

High energy? Snow day play. Winding down? Cozy or calm.

Our favorite winter coloring pages

Happy Snowman in a Bobble Hat

A smiling snowman with a carrot nose, a bobble hat, a striped scarf and mittens. It looks simple, but all those knit stripes add up to 75 spaces. I always print this one first.

Polar Bear Cub Catching Snowflakes

A chubby cub in a striped scarf sits in the snow with its tongue out, next to a little pine tree. Every kid I’ve given it to sticks their tongue out too. 35 spaces.

Snow Day Puppy on a Sled

Bubble letters spell SNOW DAY over a puppy in a bobble hat and scarf, riding a sled down a snowy hill. I keep a copy in a drawer for the morning school gets canceled.

Cozy Cabin in the Snow

A smiling log cabin with a snowy roof, a smoking chimney and curtained windows, between pine trees, with a tiny snowman by a stepping-stone path. 71 spaces for a quiet afternoon.

Stay Cozy Kitten in a Blanket

A kitten wrapped in a blanket of hearts and dots, holding a mug of hot cocoa, under the words STAY COZY. Only 25 spaces, and the blanket begs for patterns.

Which winter coloring page is right for your child?

Pick by spaces to color: fewer spaces, younger child. For preschool, start with the top row.

Winter animals coloring pages: how do the real ones stay warm?

Eight pages star winter animals. The Six Winter Animals sheet alone has a baby reindeer, a polar bear, an arctic fox, a snowy owl, a seal pup and a snowshoe hare, in scarves and earmuffs. The real ones manage without.

White animals still need color, by the way. Shade the polar bear pale cream, run soft gray along the fox’s tail, dot the owl’s feathers with gray, then color the background. The animal pops right out.

Winter coloring pages for adults

These are bold, easy pages, which is what I want on a gray January evening. Try Six Cozy Winter Clothes (83 spaces), the Mittens and Snowflakes Pattern (80) or Snow Day Fun Doodles (80). The Easy Cozy Winter Mandala surprised me: just 17 spaces, the fewest in the set, because its eight mittens and four pinecones are big shapes. A ten-minute page. Pick three cool colors and one warm one (ice blue, lilac, silver gray, cranberry) and repeat them.

How to color winter pages: 6 tips

1. Shade the snow, don’t fill it

Leave snow mostly white. Run pale blue or lavender along the bottom of each snowy patch, like real snow shadows.

2. Give the sky a color

A white snowman on white paper vanishes. A soft blue or lilac sky brings it forward.

3. Add one warm color

Keep a page mostly cool, then add one warm accent: a red scarf, an orange carrot, a yellow window. That’s how the colored snowman cover is done.

4. Color knit stripes in a rhythm

Pick two colors and alternate them, stripe by stripe, on hats, scarves and mittens. It looks knitted even in crayon.

5. Make the cabin windows glow

On the Cozy Cabin in the Snow, color the windows bright yellow against a blue evening sky. Instantly warm inside.

6. Match the tool to the child

Chunky crayons for toddlers. Colored pencils for knit patterns and doodles. Markers on heavier paper.

A little winter science to share while you color

1. Snowflakes almost always have six arms, because of the way water molecules line up when they freeze.
2. Snow looks white because its ice crystals scatter all colors of light. A single piece of ice is clear.
3. In the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice falls on December 21 or 22, the shortest day of the year.
4. Polar bears live in the Arctic and almost all penguins live in the Southern Hemisphere, so they never meet in the wild. The Hello Winter page is pure make-believe.
5. Emperor penguins huddle in big groups through the Antarctic winter, taking turns on the cold outside edge.

Winter classroom and snow day ideas

Last winter my nephew’s school closed with an hour’s notice. I printed half this stack, and these ideas came out of that morning:

• Sort by group. Hand out a mix of winter coloring pages for kids to sort into the four groups, then ask which one they’d pick for a snow day, and why.
• Winter words. Igloo, ice floe, earmuffs, sled, pinecone, chimney. Kids find each one and write its name beside it.
• Dress for the weather. On Six Cozy Winter Clothes, sort the clothes by where they go (head, hands, neck, body, feet), then count how many keep your head warm.
• A snow day story. Line up Snow Day Puppy on a Sled, Two Bunnies Building a Snowman, Cozy Cabin in the Snow and Stay Cozy Kitten in a Blanket, and tell one snow day from morning to bedtime.
• A winter coloring book. Staple the all-pages PDF, or hand out one page each school day for about a month.

Our free classroom license explains what you can print.

Printing tips for the best results

• Print the whole set at once. The all-pages PDF is a free 24-page winter coloring book.
• Print in black and white with “Fit to page.”- Use light cardstock for markers. Dark blues won’t bleed through.

How I made and checked these pages

Every one of these cute winter coloring pages is an original ColorTheDay design, checked before it went live: bold, closed outlines, simple enough for a preschooler, and a title that says what’s actually drawn. Eight pages were redrawn at least once, and a snowflake pattern that never came out clean got cut. The groups and animal notes are mine, and the “spaces to color” numbers are counted, not guessed.

More pages for the time of year live in our seasonal coloring pages. Save Santa and the tree for December with our Christmas coloring pages, or find more critters in our animal coloring pages. Then scroll up, pick your favorite free printable winter coloring pages and tap Download PDF!