Elephant colouring page

An elephant in profile with a wide ear, two short tusks and a curling trunk, drawn in broad areas that fill fast.

One elephant fills this page, standing in profile with a single round eye visible and the far side of the face hidden by the turn of the body. The ear is the widest shape on the sheet, a broad panel set behind the eye. Two short tusks come forward beneath it, and the trunk drops between them and curls at the end. A tufted tail hangs at the back. Black outlines, white paper, no ground line and no background, so the animal stands in open space.

The body and the ear are the two big empty regions, and they behave differently. The body is one long unbroken field, which means streaky pencil work shows across all of it; keep the strokes running the same way, corner to corner, instead of scrubbing back and forth. The ear is a separate closed shape and can take a second tone, and giving it a value slightly apart from the body is what makes the head read as a head. The trunk is a narrow ribbon and wants short strokes that follow its curve.

Marker suits the body, because a wide flat area is exactly where markers beat pencils: no grain, no gaps, one even field in a few passes. The cost is bleed, so put a scrap sheet underneath before you start. Crayon over a large area tends to skip where the paper texture rises, which leaves a mottled hide surface instead of one flat unbroken tone. Watercolour pencil offers a third route: colour the body dry, pull a damp brush across it once, and the strokes melt into a single wash.

Grey is the obvious answer for the hide, with the tusks left white or near-white and the eye ringed dark. A warmer grey, made by laying brown underneath and grey over it, reads more like skin than a flat pencil grey does. None of that binds you. The ear alone can carry a pattern while the rest stays plain, or the whole animal can go down in one strong colour with only the tusks left as bare paper. The outlines hold the shape whatever happens inside them.

An elephant's trunk is a nose and a hand at once: it breathes through it, drinks through it and picks things up with it, which is why the curling end on this sheet is the most mobile-looking part of the drawing. The wide ear is thin, and elephants fan them. Tusks are teeth rather than horns, set in the jaw instead of growing from the skull the way antlers do. The tail finishes in a coarse tuft of hair, drawn here as a small burst of short lines.

Choose actual size in the print dialogue. The elephant is drawn to fill most of an A4 sheet, and fit-to-page pulls a white margin in on all sides and shrinks the curl at the end of the trunk. Plain printer paper handles pencil and crayon without complaint. Card earns its place for marker, both because it will not buckle when the ink wets it and because a large filled body on thin paper wrinkles. A second copy is useful here, since the ear invites experiments with pattern.

Cut around the outline and the elephant becomes a silhouette you can mount on coloured card, which puts a border around the animal without drawing one. Glued flat to the front of a folder, the wide body takes a name written across it in pen once the colour has dried. Taped to a wall at eye level, the profile still reads from across the room because the shapes are large. If the sheet is going in the post, colour lightly, since thick wax layers can offset onto whatever presses against them.

This sheet is built from a small number of separate regions, and each of them is large: the body, the ear, the head and trunk, the tusks and the tail tuft. Filling any one of them is a single decision that covers a wide stretch of paper at once. That makes it a good sheet for anyone who wants to finish in one sitting, and a good sheet for testing an unfamiliar medium, because you get a wide sample of what your pens or pencils do across an area big enough to judge honestly.

Published 28 August 2026Updated 28 August 2026716 words