How to Print Coloring Pages at Home So They Actually Get Colored
You found the page. The kid is at your elbow, already holding the crayon they intend to use first. And then the printer clips the dinosaur’s tail off at the bottom edge, or spends a quarter of a color cartridge on a drawing made of black lines.
Printing a coloring page is a ten-second job, and nearly every way it goes wrong is settled before you press print. Here is how to get it right the first time, and how to have the next six pages ready before anybody asks.
What to change in the print dialog
Most of the settings can stay exactly where they are. Three are worth a look.
Black and white, or grayscale. A coloring page has no color in it, which is the entire point, so tell the printer not to reach for the color cartridges. It is usually a checkbox in the same dialog, sometimes filed under “color options”.
Scale: 100% for a PDF, “fit to page” for anything else. A PDF drawn for US Letter is already the size of the paper, so “actual size” or “100%” prints it exactly as intended. Scaling it anyway is what produces the missing tail. An image file, or a page laid out for A4, is a different shape from your paper, so that one wants “fit to page”, which gives up a little size at the edges and keeps the whole drawing on the sheet.
Draft or economy quality. An outline is an outline. Draft mode prints one perfectly well and leaves the good ink for the photos you actually want sharp.
Paper: one kind for Tuesday, one for the fridge
Plain copy paper, the ream sitting under the printer, is the right answer for the everyday stack. It takes crayon and colored pencil fine, and it costs little enough that a page can be reprinted the moment it is declared ruined.
Two exceptions worth knowing:
- Markers bleed through thin paper. Slide a spare sheet underneath before they start, or the kitchen table and the next page in the stack both end up with a faint copy of the drawing.
- A keeper deserves heavier paper. If a page is headed for the fridge, a grandparent’s mailbox, or a frame, run it on the heaviest paper your printer will take. Cardstock survives tape, a magnet, and the footwell of a car.
And print one side only. A two-sided coloring page is an argument about which side to do first, and a marker settles the argument on its own.
Print more than one
Kids go through pages faster than anyone expects. Printing a single page is how you end up back at the printer with a four-year-old mid-meltdown behind you, so print five while you are there and put the spares somewhere findable.
The version of this that has saved us most often is a go bag: five folded pages and four crayons in the bottom of a bag or the glovebox. A restaurant wait or a long line at the pharmacy stops being a problem. Twenty quiet minutes is twenty quiet minutes.
Pick pages that print well
Not every page is worth the ink. Look for bold outlines with open space inside the shapes. Fine, busy line art looks impressive on a screen and then frustrates a four-year-old whose crayon does not stay inside thin lines. Big shapes are what a small hand can fill in without being told to slow down.
After that, the only thing that matters is whether they already care about the subject. A mediocre drawing of a shark beats a beautiful mandala for a kid who is deep in a shark phase.
Pages that already print right
Our coloring pages by theme are free to download: dinosaurs, unicorns, space, ocean, cars and more. Every one is a US Letter PDF with a half-inch margin, so 100% is the correct setting and nothing arrives clipped, and each sheet has a “Colored by ____, Age ___” line along the bottom for whoever ends up on the fridge. There is nothing to sign up for.
When the page they want does not exist
Every parent has heard the very specific request. Not a dragon — a dragon who loves cupcakes. Not a dog — the dog from the joke we made up at dinner. That page is not in any library, because it only exists in your kid’s head.
That is the part we built CrayonBloom for. Type the one idea they cannot stop talking about — “a capybara mail carrier”, “a unicorn baking a rainbow cake” — and we draw it as a clean, printable page, sized for the paper you already have. Just your email, no card. Make your first page free and print it tonight; if the first one is not quite right, nudge the idea and draw another.
When one page is not enough
Sometimes a single sheet is all the afternoon needed. Sometimes the idea is too good to leave at one page, and CrayonBloom can turn that one into a real printed book, a bound story built around your kid’s idea with pages to color and puzzle pages like mazes and dot-to-dots, printed to order and mailed to your door.
You only ever pay for the printed book, and the full price is on the page before you check out. Have a look at the books and pricing whenever you are ready.
For tonight, though: grayscale, 100%, plain paper, print five. The crayons are waiting.
More to read: how to make a personalized coloring book for your kid and custom coloring pages from your kid’s idea.