This coloring page is really a set of instructions. A kitchen knife sits at the top left; below it is the whole melon with its dark stripes; and arrows lead from the uncut fruit to the shapes it becomes — a round cross-section, a triangular wedge, a half-moon. The Japanese line at the bottom, スイカ切ってみよう, means “let’s try cutting a watermelon,” which is the whole idea of the sheet in four words. It is line art only, so every colour is yours to choose. Free to download and print, no registration needed.
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
What do you remember about eating watermelon in summer?
Have you ever tried suikawari — the blindfolded beach game of splitting a watermelon with a stick? How did it go?
Did you like spitting the seeds out as you ate?
Do you put salt on watermelon, or eat it plain?
Where does the watermelon come from?
Africa — but not the corner it is usually assigned to. The old account points at the Kalahari; a 2021 genome study identified the Kordofan melon of Sudan, in north-east Africa, as the closest relative and probable ancestor of the sweet watermelon we eat now. Egyptian tombs carry watermelon seeds and images from around four thousand years ago. Its arrival in Japan is usually placed in the sixteenth or seventeenth century by way of China, though earlier dates are argued and none is settled. One filing note: in Japanese agricultural statistics watermelon is counted with the vegetables, as a “fruit-bearing vegetable,” which is why the Japanese original is tagged as both. The flesh is about ninety per cent water, and its red comes from lycopene, the same pigment that colours tomatoes. Lycopene is heavily studied; what it does inside a person who eats watermelon is not settled, so treat that as everyday kitchen and nutrition talk rather than medical advice.
Where does spitting watermelon seeds come from?
It is a summer habit in Japan — at festival stalls and on beaches — but the Japanese page calls it uniquely Japanese, and that is not right. The organised version of the sport is American. The Luling Watermelon Thump in Texas, held since 1954, has long made a championship of it, and the Guinness record of 22.91 metres — set by Jason Schayot in Texas in 1995 — is the “over twenty metres” figure the Japanese article quotes. What has changed is the ammunition: most watermelons sold today are seedless, so the game is harder to play than it was a generation ago. The melon in this drawing is not seedless. Both the round slice and the wedge have their seeds drawn in, and they are the last thing to colour, after the red is down.
Does thumping a watermelon really tell you it is ripe?
It is a fair rule of thumb rather than a test. A ripe melon has looser, more open flesh, so it answers a knuckle with a deeper, hollower note. Two signs on the skin are more reliable, and both of them are in this drawing. The stripes should be sharply defined rather than blurred, and the stem end should have dried off. Add a third the drawing leaves to you: the field spot, the pale patch where the melon lay on the ground, which turns from white to a buttery yellow as it ripens. That field spot is also the best colouring advice on this page — leave it nearly white. If you flood the whole rind with one even green it reads flat. Dark stripes, a lighter green between them, a pale patch underneath, and a thin band of white pith inside the rind will do more for this melon than any amount of red.
