Castle Coloring Pages

• Stone fortresses: square towers, thick walls and a gatehouse, based on real medieval castles.
• Fairy tale castles: tall thin towers with cone roofs and long flags.
• Sandcastles: bucket-shaped towers, a shell on top and a moat dug by hand.
• Castle ruins: broken walls, empty window arches and ivy climbing the stone.
• Castles with dragons: a dragon wrapped around a tower or circling overhead.
• Knights and royal courts: armor, shields, thrones and banners.
• Imaginary castles: castles made of ice, or floating on a cloud.

Real castles were built for defense, and nearly every feature had a job.

• Moat: a deep ditch, often filled with water, that kept attackers and their ladders away from the walls.
• Drawbridge: a bridge over the moat that could be pulled up.
• Portcullis: a heavy grille of wood and iron that dropped down to block the gate.
• Battlements: the tooth-shaped tops of the walls. Defenders stood behind the raised parts and looked out through the gaps.
• Arrow slits: narrow openings that let an archer shoot out while staying hard to hit.
• Keep: the strongest tower, where the lord's family lived. It was the last place to fall.

Many of the earliest castles in Europe were wooden towers on a mound of earth. Stone came later, partly because it didn't burn.

For stone walls, don't use one flat gray. Lightly color the whole wall, then go over random blocks again with brown-gray or blue-gray. Add green moss near the water and dark shadows inside the windows. Flags and roofs are the place for bright color.