Animal Coloring Pages for Adults

What these animals have meant

Animals in art are rarely just animals. Long before anyone wrote a bestiary, people had agreed that certain creatures stood for certain things, and those agreements have been remarkably stable across continents and centuries. Here is what the animals on this page have carried.

The raven - the bird that gets blamed for the news

Ravens are the most misread birds in symbolism. They are scavengers, so they arrive after a battle, and people who arrive after a disaster get associated with causing it. In Norse myth Odin's two ravens are Thought and Memory, and he is afraid of losing Memory more. In the Native traditions of the Pacific Northwest the raven is the one who steals the sun and gives away daylight. The consistent thread is not death. It is intelligence that makes people uncomfortable.

The swan - beauty with a bad temper

The swan is the one animal whose symbolism almost everyone gets from ballet and almost everyone gets slightly wrong. Swans mate for life, which is where the fidelity reading comes from. They are also large, territorial and entirely willing to break a person's arm. The six brothers turned into swans in the fairy tale are not being made beautiful. They are being made unable to speak.

The owl - wisdom, or a warning, depending where you are

In Greece the owl belongs to Athena and means knowledge. In much of Central America and parts of Africa, an owl calling near a house means a death is coming. Both readings come from the same fact: owls are silent, nocturnal, and they see you before you see them. Whether that is wisdom or menace depends entirely on whether you think being seen is safe.

The moth - not a lesser butterfly

Moths are drawn to light and are destroyed by it, which is the whole of their symbolism in about ten words. But the older meaning is gentler: moths work at night, at the hours nobody watches, and several traditions read them as messages from the dead precisely because they appear in a lit room out of complete darkness. A butterfly means transformation completed. A moth means transformation that happens where no one is looking.

The serpent - the only animal that leaves itself behind

Snakes are ambiguous everywhere and for one reason: they shed. A creature that walks away from its own skin is either a symbol of renewal or a symbol of untrustworthiness, and every tradition picks one. The medical caduceus and the serpent in Eden are the same animal read in opposite directions.

Coloring notes for animals

• Fur and feathers are direction, not texture. Follow the way the line already flows and the animal will look alive; cross it and it will look stuffed.
• Eyes last, and leave a white spot. One unfilled highlight is the difference between an animal and a diagram.
• Black animals are not black. Color a raven in three cool tones and leave the paper showing along the top of the wing, and it will read blacker than solid black ever does.
• Wings on moths and butterflies want the same colors on both sides but not the same pressure. Perfect symmetry looks printed.

The fox and the deer

Foxes are the trickster of the northern hemisphere - clever, self-interested, and in every telling slightly more sympathetic than the people they outwit. The deer is the opposite figure: in Celtic and Arthurian material a white stag appears specifically to lead a hunting party away from everything it knows, and the story only starts once they follow. Between them they cover most of what animals do in stories - one shows you what you are, the other takes you somewhere.

The bee, which is barely an animal in the tradition

Bees were treated as a household member across most of Europe. The custom of "telling the bees" - going to the hives to announce a death in the family, sometimes draping them in black - was still being recorded in the twentieth century, and the belief was that unannounced bees would leave or die. There are bees tucked into several of the botanical pages here. They are not decoration; they are the tradition's way of saying a place is inhabited.

Why these animals sit inside scenes

It would be easier to draw a raven on a blank sheet. The reason none of these pages does that is that an animal alone is a specimen, and an animal in a place is a story. Circe's herd only means anything with the cup in the frame. The swan brothers are six, not one, because the number is the point. If you have colored animal pages before and found them oddly unsatisfying to finish, this is usually why - there was nothing for the animal to be doing.

Animals as the parts of a person

The oldest use of animals in art is not zoological at all. It is a way of naming a part of someone that does not have a polite word: the part that circles, the part that hoards, the part that goes still when frightened. That is exactly how the animals are used in these books. The page called The Storm is a hooded figure with ravens going out from her hands, and the ravens are the anger leaving - it is far easier to look at drawn as birds than described as a feeling.