Learning to Color With a Color Guide

A blank coloring page is full of possibilities, and for some people that is exactly the problem. Which color goes where? Will it look right? Color-along pages solve that by showing you a finished version first. They are a gentle way into coloring for children and a surprisingly good teacher for adults who want to learn shading and color choice.

How color-along pages work

A color-along page comes in two parts: a finished, fully colored picture and the same picture as line art, ready for you to color. In several of our books, each finished color page is paired with its line-art twin, so you can look from one to the other as you work.

The finished picture is your color guide. It shows:

• Which colors were used, and where.
• Where the shadows fall and how dark they get.
• Where highlights were left light.
• How the colors balance across the whole page.

You can follow the guide closely, borrow just a few ideas from it, or ignore it completely. All three are valid ways to use it.

Copying is a time-honored way to learn

If copying a picture feels like cheating, consider how long museums have welcomed copyists. The National Gallery in London (opens in a new tab) has encouraged copyists to be inspired by its collection since it opened in 1824. Copying was so popular in the 19th century that in 1884 alone, 26,435 copyists visited the Gallery. The museum describes copying as a great way to connect with works of art and says that anyone can be a copyist, from students to professionals.

A color guide is the same idea at kitchen-table scale. Matching someone else's colors forces you to look closely: at how a petal goes from pink to deep rose, or how a dragon's belly is lighter than its back. That close looking is what improves your own work.

Copy first, then reinterpret

A good way to learn from a guide is in stages.

Stage 1: Faithful copy

Match the guide as closely as you can. Do not worry about perfection. The goal is to notice decisions you might not have made yourself, such as a purple shadow on a green leaf, or a background left pale so the subject stands out.

Stage 2: Same values, new colors

Keep the light and dark pattern from the guide but change the hues. The Andy Warhol Museum's color terminology handout (opens in a new tab) defines hue as another name for a color and value as the lightness and darkness of a color. If the guide uses a dark blue in one place, try a dark purple or dark green there instead. Because the values stay the same, the picture still reads clearly.

Stage 3: Your own version

Use the guide only for ideas. Change the season, swap a daytime scene for a night sky, or choose a completely different palette. Our guide to color theory for coloring pages has palettes to start from.

Using the guide to learn shading

The most useful thing a color guide can teach is shading, because it shows you where light and dark go before you commit.

Try this checklist each time you study a guide:

1. Find the light source. Look for the brightest areas. Is the light coming from the top, the side, or the front?
2. Find the darkest darks. Notice where they are: under a chin, inside a flower, beneath a wing.
3. Look for highlights. A glossary from the Brooklyn Museum (opens in a new tab) describes "reserved highlights," areas of white paper kept free of color. The same idea applies here: look for the pale shine on an eye, a crown or a scale in the guide, and keep those spots light in your own version.
4. Count the colors in one shape. A single leaf might use a light green, a mid green and a dark green. That tells you how many layers to plan.
5. Copy one shape first. Before you tackle the whole page, practice matching just one petal or one wing.

If you color with pencils, work from your lightest color to your darkest within each shape. Our guide to colored pencil techniques explains layering and blending.

Using the online color picker

On our free coloring pages, color-along books show the color guide right next to the page (or below it on a phone). You can borrow colors from it directly:

1. Open a free page from a color-along book in the free coloring library.
2. Tap anywhere on the color guide. The tool picks up the exact color at that spot and makes it your current color. You will see a short "Color borrowed from the guide" message.
3. Tap a space in the line art with the Fill tool to fill it, or switch to the Brush for edges and details.
4. Borrow again for shading. Because shaded areas contain several colors, tap a lighter and a darker part of the same shape in the guide to pick up both.
5. Adjust if you like. The last swatch in the palette opens a full color picker, already set to the color you borrowed, so you can nudge it a little lighter, darker or warmer.

A few more tools help:

• Undo and Redo let you try a color without worry.
• Zoom helps with small spaces.
• Big fills makes the fill stop only at strong lines, which is quicker on detailed pages.
• Your coloring saves on your device, so you can come back later. When you are done, save it as a picture or PDF, or print it.

Color guides for children

For young children, a color guide turns coloring into a looking game:

• "Can you find this pink in the box?"
• "Which part of the unicorn is the lightest?"
• "Is your dragon going to match, or be a different color?"

Make it clear that matching is optional. Some children love to copy exactly, while others will happily make a green princess and a purple tree. Both are learning to look and to choose.

The Wisconsin 4-H Drawing and Painting guide (opens in a new tab) gives advice that suits colorists of every age: don't judge your work too soon or be over-critical of your efforts, and work many times in many ways so you can compare what you have done and see how you have improved. Keeping a few pages from the same book side by side is an easy way to see that progress.

Try it

• Practice shading on flowers with the color-along pages from Floral Bliss, and try borrowing two greens from a single leaf.
• Pick a page with a color guide from the unicorn coloring pages, match it once, then color it again in your own palette.
• Try the Stage 2 challenge on a guided page from the dragon coloring pages: keep the guide's light and dark pattern but change every color.