Snake colouring page

A coiled snake with a raised head, forked tongue, and a row of big diamonds down its back, free to print on A4.

The snake on this sheet is drawn as one long body that folds into two wide loops, the way a rope falls when you drop it in a slow circle. The head comes up out of the top of the coil and turns towards you, mouth slightly open, with a forked tongue reaching into the white space above. Down the length of the body runs a row of large diamonds, each one outlined separately, so the pattern reads as a chain of shapes rather than a texture. Everything is black outline on white paper.

Start with the loops themselves. The two curves of the body are the largest continuous areas on the page, and filling them first gives you a base to judge every other choice against. Work along the curve rather than across it, letting your strokes follow the direction the body travels, and the coil will look rounded instead of flat. If you want a sense of weight, keep the outer edge of each loop slightly darker than the middle. The diamonds can wait, since they sit on top of whatever you lay down here.

The diamonds are the part that rewards patience. Each one has a point at the top and bottom and two corners at the sides, and the outline narrows sharply into those points. Press hard there and the tip of your pencil or crayon will slide past the line before you notice. A lighter touch, taken in from the corners towards the centre, keeps the shape clean. Filling every diamond the same way gives one steady band; alternating two fills turns the pattern into a repeating rhythm down the back.

The head holds the smallest shapes on the sheet. There is one eye, the curve of the jaw, and the tongue, which splits into two thin prongs. A fine-tipped coloured pencil or a gel pen handles the tongue better than a marker, which will flood past the outline and turn the fork into a blob. If markers are what you have, colour the body with them and switch to a pencil for the head. Crayons skip on shapes that small, and the skipping shows more on white than it does inside a filled loop.

Browns, tans and dull greens sit naturally on a diamond-patterned body, and holding the diamonds a shade or two off the body colour lets the pattern show without shouting. That is one option. Nothing on this page requires it. A purple snake with orange diamonds is exactly as printable, and because the pattern is made of separate outlined shapes, you can give each diamond its own colour and let the page turn into a chain of small stained-glass panels. The white paper between the shapes will hold it all together.

A snake's forked tongue is not a weapon. It flicks out to collect scent from the air and carries it back into the mouth, and on this sheet the tongue is caught mid-flick, reaching out past the open mouth into the white above the head. Snakes have no eyelids, so the eye here is drawn as an open shape with no lid line above it, and they shed their skin as they grow. None of that changes how you colour the page, but it does explain why the head looks the way it does.

Print it on plain A4 paper at actual size rather than fit-to-page, so the diamonds keep their proportions and the outline stays crisp at the edges. If markers are the plan, a sheet of thicker card stops the ink reaching the table underneath. Two copies printed at once lets two people work on the same coil side by side and compare what they did with the same set of diamonds. We laid the PDF out for A4, and the PNG preview is there so you can see the drawing before you spend the ink.

When it is done, the coil is worth taping to a window if you want to try it, since light coming through the paper can catch the diamonds and leave the two loops readable from across a room. It also cuts out well: trim just outside the outline and you get a single curved shape to mount on a darker piece of card. This sheet gives the snake no ground line to stand on and no setting behind it, no horizon and no plants at any edge. The snake floats on white, and the empty space around it is part of the design.

Published 28 August 2026Updated 28 August 2026751 words