Hedgehog colouring page

A hedgehog in profile beside an apple, its whole back drawn as one row of big triangular spikes.

A hedgehog stands in profile facing left, with one round eye and a filled pupil, a small round ear, a pointed snout with a little nose at the tip and a curved smile below it. Its back is drawn in the simplest way this subject can be drawn: a single row of large triangles running along the top outline, with one long curved line beneath them separating the spiny back from the face and feet. Everything inside that curve is one enormous open area. Two small feet show at the bottom, and an apple with a leaf stands beside the animal at the right.

That one big open back is what makes this a good sheet for a young hand and a slow sheet for anyone who wants detail. There is nothing to steer around: a crayon can cross the whole body in one pass. The triangles along the top are the only shapes needing care, and even those are large, closed and well separated. It is possible to finish this page in three colours and have it look complete.

If you want more from it, the back is an invitation rather than an empty field. Drawing your own spines into that space, as short strokes leaning the same way as the triangles above them, turns one flat area into texture and takes only a few minutes. Because the drawing has left the area plain, anything added there is yours rather than a correction of a line that was already on the page.

The triangles themselves are worth a plan. Filling all of them one colour gives a clean, graphic animal. Alternating two colours along the row gives a spiky rhythm that is visible from a distance. Filling every second one and leaving the others white is the fastest of the three, and it reads as light catching the spines. Whichever you pick, work from the nose end backward so the sequence does not have to be corrected at the tail.

The face is small and holds the only fine work on the page: the eye is already filled, but the nose, the ear and the mouth line all sit within a couple of pencil widths of each other. A sharp pencil handles them comfortably. If a marker is the tool in hand, do the face last, after the broad areas, so that a slip has nowhere important to land.

The apple is the second subject on the sheet and the natural place for the strongest colour. It is a single round closed shape with a stalk and a leaf, which makes it about as forgiving as a shape can be, and putting a solid red or green there gives the page a second point of interest away from the animal. The leaf carries a centre vein, so it splits into two halves that can differ slightly.

One plain fact about the animal is worth knowing while you fill it. A hedgehog's spines are modified hairs — stiff, hollow tubes of keratin, the same material as fingernails and ordinary hair — and unlike a porcupine's quills they are not barbed and do not come loose. That is why they are drawn here as part of the body outline rather than as loose objects: on a real hedgehog they stay attached.

Print at actual size on plain A4 paper. Nothing here is delicate enough to be lost at a smaller scale except the face, but the face is the part that makes it a hedgehog. Card is only necessary if markers are involved, and the large open back is exactly where marker ink will soak through onto whatever the page is resting on. Cut out along the row of triangles and the animal comes away with a sawtooth top edge, which stands up as a shape on its own.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026638 words