Nature Coloring Pages

Trees, water, and why they carry so much

Ask people to draw a feeling and a surprising number of them draw a landscape. Not because a forest is calming wallpaper, but because trees and water are the two things in the world that visibly do what a person does slowly: grow in one place, or move and change shape without ever stopping being themselves. Every culture that has told stories has used them for exactly that.

The tree that stands for a life

The single tree is one of the oldest pictures of a person there is. Roots you cannot see, a trunk everyone judges you by, and a crown that only exists because of the two. Norse myth hung the world on one. The Celts held that particular species carried particular temperaments - oak for endurance, birch for beginnings, hawthorn for the threshold between one state and the next. When you color a tree page slowly, the order almost picks itself: roots first, because they came first.

Why the burnt forest is in this collection

There is a page here of a burnt forest with one green sprout in it. It is not an optimistic picture and it is not meant to be a sad one. Fire clears the canopy, and the seeds of several pine species will not open at all until they have been through it. The image is literal before it is symbolic, which is what makes it bearable to sit with.

Water: the only element that keeps no shape

Rivers, lakes and open sea do different work in a drawing. A river has a direction, so a river page reads as time passing - the thawing river on this page is exactly that. A lake holds still and reflects, which is why lakes in folklore are where people meet themselves, usually badly. Open sea has no edge and no landmark, and that is why the map-maker over the foggy sea is a picture of not knowing what comes next rather than a picture of a boat.

The fog, specifically

Fog is the hardest thing on this page to color and the most rewarding. It is not white. It is the same colors as everything else, with the contrast pulled out of them. If you color a foggy page with a grey pencil you will get a flat grey page. If you color it with the scene's own colors used lightly and left unblended at the edges, it will read as weather.

Coloring notes for landscape pages

• Establish the far distance first and keep it pale. Everything nearer can then be as dark as you like without the picture collapsing.
• Foliage is a value problem, not a green problem. Three values of one green beat six different greens every time.
• Water takes the colors of what is around it plus one cooler tone. Reflections are darker than you expect and they sit directly under the thing reflected, not off to one side.
• Leave the sky mostly alone. On a line drawing, an empty sky is what gives the trees somewhere to be.

If you want the quiet version

Several pages here have no figure in them at all - just the place. Those are the ones to print when you want to color without being asked anything. The pages with a person in them carry a question in the text underneath, and some evenings that is not what you want.

Which tree meant what

The older European traditions did not treat trees as interchangeable greenery. The oak was the tree of endurance and of oaths - it is the slowest to rot and the most likely thing in a field to be struck by lightning, which is how it ended up belonging to thunder gods from Zeus to Thor. Birch was the tree of beginnings because it is the first species back on cleared ground; birch twigs were used to sweep a room before a new year. Willow, which grows where the water table is high and which can be cut to the ground and regrow, meant grief that does not kill you. Yew, which can live two thousand years and every part of which is poisonous, was planted in churchyards long before there were churches there.

The forest as a place you go into on purpose

In folklore the forest is almost never scenery. It is the place the story sends someone when they have to change - Dante's dark wood, the children in the Grimms, the knight who must ride in alone. What all those tellings share is that the forest is entered deliberately and left different. That is worth knowing while you colour one, because it is the reason a wood full of small marks holds attention in a way a field of grass does not: you are meant to be able to get lost in it.

The seasons are four different drawing problems

Spring pages have the least to colour and the most white left over. Summer pages are the trap - full canopy means a whole sheet of foliage and it is very easy to end up with green soup. Autumn is the most forgiving, because the palette is already high-contrast and any two warm colours next to each other look intentional. Winter is the hardest and the most striking: nearly everything stays paper-white and the entire picture is carried by the few darks you place.

Water in myth, briefly

Wells are where you make a wish because a well is a hole to somewhere else. Rivers are crossed, not entered - almost every underworld in European myth has one and a ferryman to match. The sea is the only one with no far bank in the telling, which is why sea stories are about not coming back rather than about arriving. The pages here follow that: the river page is about change, the lake page is about looking, and the sea page is about not knowing.