About Nurie Zukan

Nurie Zukan is more than a collection of coloring pages. It is a free picture encyclopaedia and a place to play, built to find the small seeds of curiosity in a child and help them grow. Our hope is that the pages here give children a hand in drawing the person they will become.

Made in Japan — and it shows

• Nurie Zukan is drawn and published in Japan, and the site began in Japanese. That means many of the subjects are the Japanese ones. The police car is a Japanese police car, white over black with a red light bar. The trains are the ones that run on Japanese lines. The castles, shrines and temples are real places you could visit.
• The same goes for the seasons and festivals: the pages for spring are cherry blossom and the Doll Festival, and the ones for summer are fireworks and cicadas. Some pages have no Western equivalent at all — hiragana and katakana practice, osechi New Year food, yokai from old stories.
• We think that is a feature, not a problem. A coloring page is a good way to look closely at something you have not seen before. If a page shows something unfamiliar, the article beside it explains what it is and how to colour it.

Colouring is where the noticing starts

• We started Nurie Zukan because we believe that something as simple as filling in a shape carries a surprising amount of learning. Looking at a picture is passive. Colouring it is not — the hand slows the eye down, and that is when children start to notice things.
• Pick a dinosaur page and the details begin to matter: the heavy legs of a Tyrannosaurus, the plates along a Stegosaurus's back, the particular shape of a Triceratops's horns. The hand holding the pencil becomes a small explorer's eye.
• On the insect pages it is the hard shell of a rhinoceros beetle, the folded front legs of a mantis, the bright pattern on a ladybird. "So that's what it looks like!" tends to be followed closely by "but why is it shaped like that?" — and that question is the point.

From liking something to being good at it

• That "why?" is what drives learning. What matters to us is the process that follows it — a child looking something up, thinking it over, and coming to understand it. Searching online, asking a parent, finding a book about it at the library. Knowledge arrived at that way is not memorised; it is found, and it stays.
• Each time that curiosity is satisfied, the liking grows a little deeper. Given time, it stops being just a pastime and becomes something a child is genuinely good at — sometimes the beginning of a subject they study, or a job they do.
• Today's favourite thing, tomorrow's question, and eventually the pleasure of finding out what you actually want to do. That is the path we would like to walk with children.

What you will find here

• Nurie Zukan covers a wide range of subjects, because children are interested in a wide range of things.
• • Insects — rhinoceros beetles, stag beetles, mantises, ladybirds and more
  • Fish and sea life — dolphins, whales, sharks, jellyfish
  • Dinosaurs — Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Stegosaurus and others from the Triassic through the Cretaceous
  • Animals — pandas, red pandas, dogs, cats, birds
  • Vehicles — trains, cars, planes
  • Flowers and plants — roses, sunflowers and the flowers of each season
  • Landmarks — castles, shrines, temples and famous places around the world
• Every subject comes in Easy, Medium and Hard, so there is something that fits whoever is holding the pencil — a three-year-old, or an adult who wants an hour of quiet. New pages are added every week.

Built with the people who use it

• We would like to grow Nurie Zukan together with the people who use it. If there is a coloring page you would like to see, please send us a request through the contact form. Requests are read, and they shape what gets drawn next.
• Every page on this site is free to download and print, at home, in a classroom, in a nursery or in a care home. We hope you find something here worth colouring in.