A print cabinet, not a gallery

Coloring Catalog started from a small annoyance: finding a printable coloring page online takes far longer than it should. The drawing is behind a thumbnail, the thumbnail is behind a gallery page, the gallery page has a download button that opens an ad, and by the time the PDF arrives the child has moved on.

So this site is arranged like a cabinet of prints. A subject is a drawer. The drawer holds every sheet on that subject, each one printable from where it sits. There is no separate page per drawing: tap a sheet and it opens large, with Download and Print right under it.

How the sheets are made

A collection starts as a list of scenes rather than poses. Ask for “a cat coloring page” and you get the same sitting cat every other site has. Ask for a cat asleep in a laundry basket, a cat chasing a ball of yarn under a table, a cat on a windowsill in the rain, and every sheet in the drawer is a different afternoon of coloring. Once a scene has been used in a collection, it is not used again there.

Before a batch goes up, every drawing goes through the same checks.

• Page size. Each sheet must have A4 proportions and comes as a 300 dpi PDF, so it prints sharp on A4 paper or fitted to US Letter.
• Duplicates. Each drawing is compared against every other sheet in its collection, and near-copies are taken out. Two different titles on the same picture do not count as two sheets.
• Detail. Each drawing is measured for how much of the page is taken up by spaces too small for a marker. That measurement sorts the collection into Quick to color and Lots of detail, with the same thresholds on every collection, so “quick” means the same thing for a dinosaur as for a mandala. Counting shapes was tried first and got it wrong: a garden fence makes thirty identical little rectangles and is still an easy page.
• Names that match the picture. A title or description that does not match the drawing gets corrected, so a search for one character does not turn up another.

How new collections are chosen

From what people look for. The list of upcoming collections is built from US search data: how many people search for a subject, how hard it is to find a good free version, and when in the year the interest peaks, so Halloween and Christmas drawers are stocked before the season rather than during it. Searches that are rising quickly among people looking for coloring pages get a second look, because a new movie or toy shows up there before it reaches the monthly search figures.

And from requests. If what you want is not here, ask for it. When a subject can be drawn, it goes up on the site within 24 to 48 hours.

What it costs

Nothing, and there is no account. No email address is asked for before a download, nothing is watermarked, and no sheet is held back for a paid tier. Even the pack, which gathers sheets from different collections into one PDF, is kept in your own browser rather than on a profile.

The site earns a commission when someone buys pencils, markers, paper or books through the Amazon links on some pages, at no extra cost to them; the disclosure explains it. Nothing is ever placed between you and a PDF: no pop-up to close before a download and no countdown.

Using them

Home, classroom, daycare, library, care home, waiting room: print as many as you like. The license covers it in full. The short version is that the only thing off-limits is selling the blank files or repackaging them as your own set. Characters and brands belong to their owners, and the copyright page explains how a rights holder can ask for a drawing to be removed.

For anything else, write to [email protected].