Make Your Own Dinosaur: How to Invent One With Your Kid, and Name It
There is a point in the dinosaur phase where printables stop being enough. Your kid knows the names. They know which one had feathers, and exactly why you are wrong about the velociraptor. And what they want to color is not a T. rex — it is their T. rex, the one who bakes cakes, tiny useless arms and all.
That dinosaur is not in any coloring library, because it does not exist yet. Here is how to get it out of their head and onto paper.
Three questions that pull the idea out
Kids rarely hand over a finished picture. They hand over “a dinosaur,” then wait for you to be impressed. Three questions turn that into something anybody could draw:
- What is it doing? This is the one that matters. “A stegosaurus” is a shape. “A stegosaurus learning to skateboard” is a scene, with a wobble and a scraped knee in it.
- Where is it? A jungle, a kitchen, the school parking lot. The background is where the greens go once the dinosaur itself is colored in.
- What is the one strange detail? Ask it exactly like that, then wait. You will get a bow tie, a lunchbox, or a very small hat. The strange detail is usually the part they care about most.
Write down what they say, in their words. Resist tidying it up; you are taking dictation from a four-year-old paleontologist.
Name it the way a paleontologist would
Here is the part that surprises parents: dinosaur names are not built to be hard. They are combinations of word roots, and the roots describe the animal. Triceratops is three, horn, face — a three-horned face. That is the whole trick.
Names can also come from a place or a person. Albertosaurus is named for Alberta, Canada, where it was found. Lambeosaurus is named after the paleontologist Lawrence Lambe.
So your kid has three legitimate options:
- Describe it. Bigteethface. Caketail. Whatever the dinosaur most obviously is.
- Name the place. The park, the backyard, the couch it was invented on.
- Name the person. Themselves, usually. This is allowed — it is one of the three ways real dinosaur names get made.
Nobody has to translate anything into Greek. Naming is a describing job, and describing is something kids are already good at.
What makes an invented dinosaur easy to draw
One character, one action, one place. That is the shape of every dinosaur page we draw:
A baby stegosaurus learning to ride a skateboard in the park.
Compare that with “a really cool dinosaur that’s the strongest one.” The second is a feeling, not a picture. When an idea comes out vague, resist adding adjectives — ask what it is doing, and the picture shows up on its own.
Turn it into a page they can color
Once you have the sentence, you have everything:
- Type it in. “A friendly T. rex baking a giant birthday cake in a sunny kitchen.” The sillier and more specific, the better.
- We draw it. A bold, printable page of exactly that dinosaur, doing exactly that thing.
- Print it free. Make your kid’s dinosaur, free — just your email, no card. Re-print it as often as the crayons demand.
The first time a kid sees the thing they made up come back as a page they can color, they go quiet for a second. That is the whole product.
When one dinosaur turns into a whole species
Dino universes expand. If your kid’s has grown past a single page, CrayonBloom can turn it into a printed book — a bound story starring their dinosaur, with pages to color and dino-themed activities like mazes and connect-the-dots, printed to order and shipped to your door.
The pages are always free to try; the printed book is the only thing you pay for, and the full price is shown before checkout. Have a look at the books and pricing when you are ready.
And if you just want something to print tonight
Fair. Invention can wait for the weekend. Our dinosaur coloring pages are free to download — T. rex, triceratops, stegosaurus and the rest, drawn in bold outlines for small hands. There are a few sourced dinosaur facts on that page too, for when the crayons are moving and somebody asks a question you cannot answer.
More to read: custom coloring pages from your kid’s idea and how to make a personalized coloring book.