Emoji Coloring

What is Emoji Coloring?

Forty-eight pictures drawn as outlines, a palette of eighteen colours, and nothing to work out. Pick a colour, tap a shape, it fills. Tap it again with a different colour and it changes. When you are happy with it, save it as an image.

There is no score, no timer and no way to get it wrong, which makes it the least demanding thing on this site. It exists because the rest of the games all want something from you: your reaction speed, your memory, a decision. This one does not.

How it works

1. Pick a colour from the palette, or open the picker for any colour at all.
2. Tap a shape to fill it.
3. Undo steps back one fill at a time. Start over clears the picture.
4. Fill the rest floods everything still white in your current colour.
5. Save as image downloads it as a PNG at 1600 pixels square.

The pictures

Forty-eight of them, sorted from simplest to busiest. Animals including a cat, a dog, a panda, a fox, an owl, a penguin, a koala and a turtle. Food from a pizza slice and a burger to a doughnut, a cupcake and sushi. Objects and nature covering a rocket, a sailboat, a house, a guitar, a rainbow, a cherry blossom and a cactus. Plus a handful of faces.

They range from four regions to sixteen, so the balloon takes a minute and the crown takes rather longer. Your colouring is saved automatically for every picture, so you can leave one half finished and come back to it.

Why the colours never leak out

Most online colouring pages are photographs of line drawings, and the game floods pixels outward from wherever you tapped until it hits a dark line. That works right up until one line has a single-pixel gap in it, at which point the colour escapes and floods the entire picture. Anyone who has used a colouring app has hit this.

These pictures are drawn as vector shapes instead. Each region is a real object with a real boundary, so tapping fills that object and only that object. A gap is not possible because there is no gap to have. It also means the pictures stay perfectly sharp at any size, and each one is a couple of kilobytes rather than a couple of hundred.

On colouring as something to do

Colouring books for adults became a publishing phenomenon around 2015, and the usual explanation offered was stress relief. The research on that is thinner than the marketing suggested. What studies do fairly consistently find is that colouring occupies attention in a low-stakes way, which is a more modest claim and probably the honest one.

The useful thing about it is the absence of decisions that matter. Choosing between orange and yellow for a petal costs nothing and cannot be wrong, so the part of your mind that evaluates outcomes gets to stand down for a bit. That is not therapy. It is just a pleasant way to occupy your hands while you think about something else, which is what most people wanted from it anyway.

Where the pictures come from

The outlines are derived from Twemoji, the open emoji set originally published by Twitter and now maintained by contributors. Each emoji ships as a vector drawing with its shapes already separated, so converting one into a colouring page means removing the colours and keeping the shapes. The artwork is used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, credited beneath the game.

Practical notes

It works with a mouse or a finger and needs no account. Everything is saved in your own browser, so your pictures stay on your device and nothing is sent anywhere. The download is a plain PNG on a white background, suitable for printing if you want it on paper.