Compass with an Airplane Coloring Page

Add this Compass with an Airplane Coloring Page to your collection and you get a compass rose built like a mandala. It fills almost the whole sheet, ringed by a decorated bezel and pointing to the four cardinal letters, with each of its eight points carrying a different pattern inside it. A small airliner crosses the sky above. A free printable compass coloring page for ages 11 and up.

How this coloring page was created

For this page, we entered the concept: "a large compass rose filled with fine repeating decorative patterns in each point, with a small airplane flying above its top point" on Colorin AI and generated a print ready coloring page in seconds.

The phrase "in each point" is what made this a coloring page instead of a symbol. Asked for a patterned compass, the drawing fills the whole disc with one texture. Asked for pattern in each point, it treated the eight points as eight separate canvases, and gave each one a motif that appears nowhere else on the sheet.

What is in this compass coloring page

No two points of this rose are decorated the same way, and that is the whole design. One holds a Celtic knot, one holds a field of overlapping waves, one is a diamond lattice, one is fine parallel hatching.

What that buys you is eight small projects inside one page. You can finish a point in a sitting, come back to the next one later, and the sheet never looks half done because each point is complete in itself.

Counted out: an outer bezel of two concentric rings frames the whole disc, and the band between them carries an alternating sequence of about eighteen circles and eighteen diamonds running all the way around. Inside, an eight point star fills the disc, four long points reaching to the letters N, S, E and W and four shorter points on the diagonals. The four long points are split down the middle into light and shaded halves, and the four short ones carry the pattern fields: a woven knot, a set of nested wave arcs, a diamond grid and a web of radiating lines. At the center sits a small medallion, a circle holding a five point star. The four cardinal letters are drawn in outlined serif capitals just inside the bezel. Above the disc, a small passenger jet flies left to right trailing two long straight lines.

Coloring Ideas and Techniques

Old compass roses used one convention over and over: the north point in a different color from all the others. Borrowing it here costs nothing and instantly tells anyone looking at the page which way is up.

The split halves on the four long points are meant to be read as light and shadow. Using two values of the same color rather than two different colors makes the star look raised off the page, which is worth more than any amount of extra detail.

Leave the bezel until the end and keep it quiet. Thirty six small shapes in bright colors around the rim will pull attention off the rose, while a single tone with the circles left white frames it properly.