Cartoon elephant spraying water in a muddy pond with cattails and tall reeds

Happy Elephant Splashing in the Cattails

A grinning young elephant stomps through a muddy pond, spraying water from his trunk between tall reeds and cattails.

🎨 How to color it

Color the elephant a soft blue-gray, the muddy splashes warm cocoa brown, the pond water turquoise, and the cattails golden tan. Use sharp colored pencils around the many water drops, reed blades, and mud blobs, then fill the elephant’s larger body shapes with smooth marker strokes. Try making the spray fade from pale blue near the trunk to clear white at the highest droplets, as if sunlight is shining through it.

The story behind this coloring page

Kito’s Mud-Made Moon — At the edge of the cattail marsh, where warm mud squished like pudding between toes, Kito pressed his trunk into the bank and rolled a round, brown ball. Read the full story →

At the edge of the cattail marsh, where warm mud squished like pudding between toes, Kito pressed his trunk into the bank and rolled a round, brown ball. He wanted to make a moon he could touch before evening came. Squelch, pat, smooth—his feet made the base, his trunk carved little puddle-craters, and his ears kept the dragonflies from landing in the wet shine.

The marsh answered with soft sounds: reed whispers, frog plunks, and the silver splash of Kito rinsing his trunk. He lifted water high and let it rain over his mud moon until it gleamed. Then something tiny bumped his ankle—a boat made from a folded reed, carrying a beetle with two seeds for oars. “Your moon has a harbor,” the beetle said.

Kito blinked. He had been making a moon, but the beetle had found a world. So Kito used one careful toe to press a bay into the side, flicked water into a winding river, and patted three pebble islands by hand and trunk. When the beetle sailed in circles, Kito stood taller than the cattails with quiet pride. Next time you spot the splashes around his feet, can you find where the mud-made moon began?