Parrot colouring page

A parrot on a branch with a big hooked beak, a folded wing of broad feathers and three long tail feathers.

A parrot perches on a branch that runs across the lower part of the sheet, its body turned towards the viewer and its head in profile facing left. One large round eye with a filled pupil and a small white highlight sits high on the head, above a heavy hooked beak drawn in two parts, with a rounded crest of feathers rising behind it. The folded wing covers most of the body and is drawn as a stack of broad feather shapes, each closed and each larger than anything else on the bird. Three long tail feathers hang below and past the branch. Two feet grip the branch, and a short leafy twig comes off it to the left.

The wing is the best thing on this page to colour and the reason to take it slowly. Its feathers are large, they overlap in a clear order, and each one is a closed shape, which means a graded sequence is possible without any blending: give the topmost feather the lightest tone and each one below it a step darker, and the wing gains depth that a flat fill cannot produce. Six or seven steps of one pencil's pressure is enough.

The three tail feathers are the same idea at a bigger scale. They are long, narrow and separate, and because they hang below the branch they sit against white paper on both sides, which makes them the most visible shapes on the sheet from a distance. Whatever goes on them should be the strongest colour in the scheme, or they read as an afterthought under a busy bird.

The beak is the one place where the drawing has done something a colourist has to respect: it is drawn as an upper hook and a separate lower mandible, with a line between them. Colouring them as one shape loses the hook. Two slightly different tones, or one tone with a harder press along the dividing line, keeps them apart and keeps the head reading correctly.

The head and the crest are open areas by comparison, and the eye is already filled with a highlight left white inside the pupil. That highlight is the only part of this drawing that must not be coloured over: it is what makes the eye look wet rather than flat, and once it is filled there is no way back on a printed sheet.

A macaw scheme, red head running into yellow and blue down the wing, is what the outline invites, and it suits a bird whose feathers are drawn as separate bands. Anything works: green over the whole body with a contrasting tail is a real parrot too, and a bird in three cool colours is still obviously a parrot because the beak and the crest carry the identification. The branch is best kept quiet, since it is the only thing on the sheet the bird is not.

A plain fact about the bird sits in the shape of its foot. Parrots have two toes forward and two back on each foot, which is why the grip drawn here wraps the branch from both sides instead of curling over it from the front — it is the arrangement that lets a parrot hold food up to its beak. The heavy hooked beak in the drawing does the other half of that job, and the two together are why the family is drawn the way it is.

Print at actual size on plain A4 paper so the divisions between the wing feathers stay open. If markers are the plan, they suit the tail and the body but will bridge the feather divisions on the wing, so a fine tip or a pencil is worth having for that half of the bird. Cut out and the parrot comes away with the branch attached under its feet, which gives the shape a base to stand on; cutting above the branch instead frees the bird alone.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026658 words