Art Coloring Pages
Welcome to my Art coloring pages section.
People have been decorating walls, floors, windows and doorsteps for thousands of years, long before anyone had paper and crayons. Some art hangs in museums, some is drawn at the front door for a festival and some is a doodle in the margin of a notebook.
Jump to: Famous Works of Art | Celtic Art | Doodles | Evolution of Illustration | Floral Folk Art | Graffiti Style | Mandalas | Rangoli | Stained Glass
Famous Works of Art
Leonardo da Vinci kept the Mona Lisa with him for years, even when he moved to France, and he kept adding paint in layers so thin that you can't see a single brushstroke. She's here with van Gogh's swirling Starry Night, Hokusai's giant wave and plenty more.
Famous Works of Art coloring pages
Celtic Art
Celtic knotwork is drawn as one unbroken line that loops over and under itself with no beginning and no end. Irish monks filled the pages of the Book of Kells with it more than 1,200 years ago, and the same patterns were carved onto tall stone crosses. The Celts also thought trees were sacred, so their Tree of Life shows the branches and roots as one joined pattern.
Doodles
Monks who copied books by hand hundreds of years ago doodled in the margins, from snails to funny faces to tiny knights. Doodling is a very old habit, and these ones fill every shape with patterns.
Evolution of Illustration
Before printing presses, every picture in a book was painted by hand. Monks in the Middle Ages spent months on a single page, decorating the letters with tiny animals and gold leaf.
Printing changed everything. Woodcut and engraved pictures could be copied again and again, so more people could own books with pictures in them. For a long time those pictures were only black and white. By the Victorian era printers could copy full color paintings cheaply, and that's when picture books for children really took off.
Telling a story in a row of pictures is much older than comic strips. The Bayeux Tapestry is about 70 metres of stitched pictures about the Norman conquest of England, and you read it from left to right just like a comic.
Beatrix Potter
Peter Rabbit began in 1893 as a picture letter that Beatrix Potter wrote to cheer up a sick little boy. She made the finished books small enough to fit in a child's hands.
Comic Strips
Newspapers made comic strips popular in the late 1800s, and the format works for any story. These days, a similar style is still used in graphic novels, comic books and manga.
Floral Folk Art
Folk artists painted flowers on chests, bowls and walls long before anyone put them on paper. Most of the designs are the same on the left as on the right, like a flower reflected in a mirror.
Floral Folk Art coloring pages
Graffiti Style
Graffiti lettering grew up in New York in the 1970s, when artists competed to invent the boldest and bubbliest way to write a name. Every artist wanted a style that nobody else had.
Mandalas
Mandala is the Sanskrit word for circle. Tibetan monks spend days making huge mandalas from colored sand and then sweep them away to show that nothing lasts forever. Most of mine are symmetrical, but a few, like this bold line flower, are a little more free and artistic.
Rangoli
During Diwali, families in India draw a rangoli on the ground at the front door to welcome their guests. They also hope the goddess Lakshmi will see it and stop by.
Stained Glass
Every dark line in a stained glass window is a strip of lead holding two pieces of colored glass together. Some church windows have been glowing in the sun for around 800 years, and the stained glass pages here use the same bold lines.