Moon Coloring Pages

The eight phases, and what people have read into them

The moon takes 29.5 days to go from new to new. We divide that into eight named phases, and almost every culture that has watched it has hung meaning on the shape.

The eight, in order

• New moon - invisible. The sun is behind it from where we stand. Beginnings, by universal agreement, because there is nothing there yet.
• Waxing crescent - the first sliver. Intention: the thing you have decided but not yet done.
• First quarter - half lit, and it looks like a half. Traditionally the point of resistance, the moment a decision costs something.
• Waxing gibbous - more than half, not yet full. Refinement, adjustment, the unglamorous part.
• Full moon - the whole face. Completion, and in folklore everywhere, exposure. Nothing hides.
• Waning gibbous - the light beginning to go. Gratitude in the modern reading, harvest in the older one.
• Last quarter - half again, on the other side. Release, letting a thing be finished.
• Waning crescent - the last sliver before dark. Rest. The pause that is not idleness.

A note on the arithmetic, because it is usually got wrong: the cycle divided evenly gives about 3.7 days per phase, but the quarters and the full and new moons are technically instants, not stretches. What we actually see is four long shapes of roughly 7.4 days each, with four moments between them.

Why the crescent is the shape that stuck

Full moons are photogenic and crescents are recognisable, which is why almost every flag, crest and amulet that uses the moon uses a crescent. A circle could be anything. A crescent is unmistakably the moon and unmistakably in motion - it is the shape that tells you time is passing, which is why it ends up on so many things meant to mark a passage.

The night garden is a real thing

Several pages here show flowers open at midnight, and that is botany rather than fantasy. Datura, moonflower, evening primrose and night-blooming cereus all open after dark and are pollinated by moths rather than bees. They are usually white or very pale, because at night brightness carries and color does not. If you color one page on this site in near-white with everything around it deep, you will have made exactly the choice the plant made.

Coloring notes for night scenes

• The mistake is coloring the sky black. A night sky is a deep colour - indigo, plum, forest green - and it needs to be a colour or the page dies.
• Moonlight is cool and it only lands on top surfaces. Pick one direction, put a pale cool tone on every upward-facing edge, and leave everything else dark.
• White flowers are not white paper. Give them the faintest wash of the sky's colour on their shadow side and they will glow instead of disappearing.
• Stars: fewer, and irregular. Evenly spaced dots read as a pattern, not a sky.

Why we only ever see one face

The moon is tidally locked to the Earth: it turns exactly once for every orbit, so the same side faces us permanently. The far side is not the dark side - it gets just as much sun - but no human eye saw it until a Soviet probe photographed it in 1959. Every moon that has ever been drawn, on every artefact in every museum, is the same face.

The named moons

Full moons picked up names from the people who had to plan around them. The harvest moon is the one nearest the autumn equinox, and it earned its name because it rises close to sunset for several nights running, which gave farmers extra working light exactly when they needed it. A blue moon is not blue and not rare in the sense people assume - it is a bookkeeping term for a thirteenth full moon in a year, which happens roughly every two and a half years. The hunter's moon, the wolf moon, the flower moon: all of them are calendars in disguise.

The tide, and the thing that is not true

The moon does move the oceans - that part is straightforward gravity and it is why there are two high tides a day rather than one. The claim that keeps getting attached to it, that the moon moves the water in the human body the same way, does not survive the arithmetic: tidal force scales with the size of the body, and a person is far too small for it to matter. Worth separating, because the symbolic reading of the moon is rich enough without borrowing physics that is not there.

Working at night

There is a practical reason so many of these pages are night scenes, and it has nothing to do with mood. Coloring in the evening is when most people actually do it, and a page that is drawn to be lit from one side sits comfortably under a single lamp. A bright daylight scene under a desk lamp always looks slightly wrong. These were drawn for the hour they get used in.