Lion coloring page

One lion in profile with a full ruffled mane, ready to print on plain letter paper and color.

The lion stands in profile, facing the left edge of the page, so you see one side of him: a single eye, one visible ear set into the fur, and four legs in a standing pose. The mane is the largest shape on the sheet, a ruffled collar of overlapping locks that circles the head and spills down over the chest and shoulders. Behind the body the tail runs out in a long curve and finishes in a tuft. Everything is drawn in black outline on white, with no shading and no background scenery to work around.

Most of the work here is in the mane. It is broken into dozens of pointed locks, each one closed off by its own line, which means you can treat it as many small areas rather than one enormous one. Filling every lock the same flat tone is a perfectly good result. Alternating two close tones, one lock and then the next, gives the ruffled edge some depth without any blending at all. If you want the mane to look like it is catching light on one side, keep the locks near the top of the head lighter and let the ones under the jaw go darker.

The body, by contrast, is wide and mostly empty. The flank, the haunch and the upper legs form one continuous field with only a few interior lines, and it is the easiest part of the page to cover quickly. Small shapes are the opposite problem: the eye, the nose, the mouth line, the toes and the tuft at the end of the tail are all tight, and pressing hard inside them tends to push pigment past the outline. A sharpened pencil and light pressure hold those corners better than a blunt tip and force.

Crayon covers the flank fast and leaves a waxy texture that suits fur, though it skips over the narrowest locks in the mane. Colored pencil is the safest choice for the whole page, since it layers and lets you build the mane up in passes. Markers give the strongest, flattest fill and make the black outline pop, but on thin paper the ink soaks through, and the mane's many small cells are hard to keep even. A gel pen is worth having on hand for the whiskers and the tail tuft, where a fine tip does more than a broad one.

Real lions run to sand and straw tones, with the mane darker than the coat and sometimes nearly black around its edge, so a tan body with a deep brown or rust mane is the true-to-life route. Nothing on the sheet requires it. The separate locks make an obvious place for a full spectrum, one color per lock, and the body takes a single flat color just as well in blue or green as in gold. The eye is small enough that whatever you put in it becomes the lion's expression, so choose it last, once the rest of the head is down.

A mane belongs to male lions, so the maned animal on this sheet is a male. The brush at the end of the tail is real and a little unusual: most cats have a tail that simply tapers, while a lion's finishes in a distinct tuft of longer hair. Lions live in groups rather than alone, and their roar carries a long way across open ground. None of that has to change how you color the sheet, but it explains why the drawing gives this animal a heavy collar of fur and a tail that ends in a point of its own.

Print it on plain letter paper at actual size rather than fit-to-page, so the mane keeps its full width and the thin gaps between locks do not close up. If markers are the plan, load the tray with the heaviest paper the printer will take, or slide a spare sheet underneath to catch what comes through. Two copies side by side let two people work on the same lion at once and compare where they took the fur. A second print is also useful insurance if the first attempt at the mane goes darker than you meant it to.

Finished, the sheet has an obvious center of gravity in the head, which makes it easy to trim close around the mane and mount the whole animal on a folded card stock sheet or a folder cover. Taped to a window, a flat body color glows and the dark mane holds its shape against the light. The line work on this drawing is packed into a single region: the flank and legs are carried by a few long curves and the tail runs out in one sweep to its tuft, while the lion concentrates nearly everything else in the fur around the face.

Published August 28, 2026Updated August 28, 2026806 words