Look Inside

About this coloring page

Cutaway drawings are the format children remember from their favourite non-fiction books, and almost nobody makes coloring pages in it. That gap is this category. Every sheet slices something open and shows the inside as neatly as a dolls house: an ant nest with its brood chambers and rubbish tip, a rabbit warren with escape tunnels, a beehive with its frames pulled out, a submarine with three decks of bunks and pipework, a space station with a sleeping bag strapped to a wall. There is a volcano halved to the magma chamber, a pumpkin cut across the middle, the Earth quartered to the core, and a hand drawn as bones so children can count them against their own. The Dutch dike cross-section deserves special mention: sand core, clay skin, stone revetment, sea on one side and a village sitting below sea level on the other. It explains in one picture something that takes a page of text. Because there are lots of small compartments, these sheets reward being colored over more than one sitting, and they work beautifully as a labelling exercise once the color is dry. The submarine is the most demanding page in the entire kids half of the site.