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By: Papaya Ink Team · Last updated: October 14, 2026
A rainbow is a full circle. The ground gets in the way, which is why you only ever see the top half of it from a field or a window, and why pilots sometimes see the whole ring floating below the plane. It also belongs to you alone: the arc is drawn by raindrops at an exact angle from your own eyes, so the person standing next to you is looking at a slightly different rainbow, and nobody has ever walked to the end of one, because it keeps its distance. The sun is always at your back, red is always on the outside, and when a second bow appears above the first, its colors run in reverse, with a strip of darker sky between the two that has carried the name of a Greek philosopher for eighteen hundred years.
These rainbow coloring pages put that arc into as many places as it turns up: over sea cliffs and canyons, inside geyser spray and garden hoses, in puddles, on toy roads, built from snow and chalk, and split out of a prism on a classroom table. Every sheet is an original Papaya Ink drawing. Click any one to open a print-ready PDF in a new tab; the pages are sized for US Letter and print cleanly on A4 with no scaling.
The order of the colors is the one piece of homework: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, from the outer edge inward. Beyond that, the trick to a rainbow that looks like light rather than a striped scarf is to let the bands bleed into each other, so press lightly, run each color into its neighbor, and leave a thread of white paper along the inside edge. Where a rainbow is reflected in water, color the reflection a shade paler than the sky. Where a scene has a shower in it, gray the rain and keep the bow bright, because that contrast is the whole reason rainbows get noticed.
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Fun Things to Make with These Coloring Pages
- Coffee-filter rainbow – draw the color bands on a flat coffee filter with washable markers, mist it with water and watch the colors run into one another. Dried on a plate, it becomes a soft tie-dye arc for a card front.
- Spectrum bookmark – cut a finished page into a tall strip straight through the rainbow, cover it with clear tape or laminate, punch a hole and knot in seven threads of embroidery floss in color order.
- Sun catcher – color the rainbow bands with oil pastels, brush the back of the paper lightly with cooking oil so it turns translucent, let it dry overnight and tape it to a sunny window.
- Prism check – borrow a glass prism or a clear crystal pendant, catch a beam of sunlight on a white wall, and compare the order of the bands with the one on your page. They match, which is the whole point.
- Color-order game – cut a colored rainbow into its seven bands along the lines, shuffle them, and have someone rebuild the arc from memory. Harder than it sounds once you get past yellow.
- Puzzle – glue a finished page onto thin cardboard, cut it into a dozen irregular pieces and keep them in an envelope. The rainbow makes it easy to see which piece goes where.
- Rainy-day window – color only the rainbow and the clouds, cut around the shape and tape it to a window on a gray morning so the real sky shows through the gaps.
- Swatch corner – before coloring, test every red, orange and yellow you own in a corner of the page and pick the three that blend best. Pencils from the same set run into each other far more smoothly than markers.
