Bear colouring page

A round bear sitting with a honey pot in its paws, drawn in thick black outlines and free to print at A4 size.

The bear on this sheet sits facing straight out of the page, round and squat, with both front paws wrapped around a honey pot held against its chest. Two eyes and a curved smile sit high on the wide face, and the muzzle is drawn as a small rounded shape below them. Because the bear is seated, the two hind paws come forward at the bottom of the body, and each one shows a large pad with a row of smaller toe pads above it. Everything is plain black outline on white, with no shading and no background scenery behind it.

Start with the belly and chest. That is the largest unbroken area on the sheet, and it sets the tone for everything else, since the head, arms and legs all read as variations on whatever goes there. The honey pot is the second big shape, and it sits right in the middle, so a colour that contrasts with the fur will keep it from disappearing into the paws that hold it. The paw pads and the toe pads are the smallest closed shapes on the page. Save those for last, when your hand has already settled into the drawing and you know how dark the rest went.

A thick outline like this one forgives a lot. Crayon fills the broad fur areas quickly, though it tends to skip across the tooth of the paper and leave a speckled surface, which happens to suit fur. Coloured pencil layers, so you can lay one pass over the whole body and then go back over the edges of the arms and legs to suggest where they overlap the chest. Markers give the flattest, most even fill and the strongest colour, but they bleed at the outline and, on thin paper, straight through to the back. A gel pen earns its place only on the pot and the pads, where the shapes are small.

Brown is the obvious answer for the body, and it is a good one, especially if you vary it: a lighter pass on the muzzle and chest, a darker one along the outer edges of the arms. Honey suggests gold or amber for what is inside the pot, though the pot itself can be any colour at all, since it is drawn as a plain vessel with a rim and nothing else. None of that is binding. A blue bear with a green pot works exactly as well on paper, and these outlines were drawn to hold any fill you give them.

Bears really do eat honey, and they are after the bee larvae in the comb as much as the sweetness. They walk with the whole foot flat on the ground, heel included, which is why a seated bear shows its hind pads the way this one does. A person sitting cross-legged shows the soles of their feet for the same reason. A bear's claws do not pull back into the paw the way a cat's do, and the fur is thick enough that the body underneath reads as one rounded mass rather than a set of limbs.

Print it on plain A4 paper at actual size rather than fit-to-page, so the outlines keep the weight they were drawn with and the margin stays even all the way around. If markers are the plan, a sheet of card or heavier printer paper will stop the colour reaching the other side. Two copies printed at once give two people the same bear to work on side by side, which is a quiet way to see how differently two sets of choices treat one honey pot.

A finished bear taped to a window turns every white area into light, and the pot in the centre is the part that reads best from across the room. The sheet also folds cleanly in half for a card, because the drawing is centred and the fold falls through empty paper rather than through the face. Cut close around the outline and mount the whole thing on a darker sheet, and the round body lifts away from its backing the way a sticker does.

This bear is a drawing built out of circles. The head, body, arms, legs and pot are all rounded, with almost no straight line anywhere on the page, so there is no feathered edge or run of fur direction to follow as you fill. The bear also sits facing you head on, which means there is no far side of the animal to think about, and both eyes look out at whoever is holding the pencil.

Published 28 August 2026Updated 28 August 2026766 words