Batman Coloring Pages

A Batman sheet is usually a figure standing with his fists up. These free printable Batman coloring pages are drawn as places instead, which is where most of the pleasure of the character actually is: a rooftop above the skyline with the signal beam crossing the sky, a stone gargoyle to crouch on, a cave with a boat at its dock, a workshop bench with a grapple gun and a magnifying lamp.

There is no fighting anywhere in the set. That was deliberate, and it makes these usable for a party table with four-year-olds at one end and nine-year-olds at the other. The quietest sheets have him kneeling in falling snow to fasten a child's mitten outside a lit bakery, and crouching in an alley to set down a bowl for a thin cat.

The problem with black, and how to get round it

This is the one collection where the obvious color is a trap. A child who fills the cape with a black pencil ends up with a shiny gray slab, and a child who uses a black marker soaks through to the next sheet.

• Use dark blue-gray for the body of the cape and the cowl. Keep pure black for the folds, the inside of the cape, the ears and the outline.
• Leave a thin bare line along the top of each fold. Bare paper is the only highlight that works on a dark surface.
• The emblem stays yellow or is left white. It is the one bright thing on the figure and it does the work of the whole page.
• The bat car takes the same treatment: dark gray panels, black in the shadows, windows in pale blue with one white diagonal stripe left blank.
• Skies go dark blue or purple rather than black, so the buildings and the beam stay visible against them.

Which sheets for which child

Quick to color above the grid keeps the sheets with the biggest shapes and opens on the simplest.

• Batarangs drying on a cloth

That band is small in this collection, because most of these pages carry a city behind them. For the youngest at a table, the rounded sheets are the ones to print: the small Batman on a chimney under a crescent moon, the two young heroes sharing popcorn on a fire escape with a cat beside them, the toy bat car at the curb.

Older children usually want the machines. The bat plane sits in the cave with its cockpit open, the boat is moored at a wooden dock with ripples spreading, and the turntable of the workshop holds a suit in a lit glass case beside a rack of spare belts.

The cave, and the way in

Some sheets are about getting there rather than being there, and they are the ones children look at twice: a bookcase swinging open in a library to show a staircase going down, a grandfather clock pivoted aside from a rough stone passage with a candle burning on the side table, and the manor itself behind its fountain and clipped hedges.

Turning a stack of these into a party

A themed birthday is mostly paper, and most of it can be colored the afternoon before.

The signal lamp sheet is the one to start with. Colored, cut out and taped to a window with a lamp behind it, it throws the emblem onto the opposite wall once the room is dark, which is a better decoration than anything sold in a packet.

The cowl portrait scales down to a mask. Print it at the size of a child's face, color it, cut the eye holes out with the point of a pencil rather than scissors, and thread elastic through two punched holes. It will not survive the week, and it does not need to.

For the table: the batarang sheet cut into individual shapes makes confetti that is worth looking at, and the manor sheet printed at half size, folded in half and written inside, is an invitation. Print the same sheet twice for the child who wants one to keep.

Afterwards, the toy bat car and the small Batman on the chimney are the sheets young children ask for again. Keep a spare copy of each in a drawer.

For more vehicles at the same weight, the car coloring pages sit next door, and the character drawer has the other recurring faces.

Why the city is drawn the way it is

The backgrounds in this collection borrow a specific look, and knowing where it comes from makes them easier to color.

The architecture is art deco pushed to extremes: stepped towers, vertical lines running the full height of a building, stone gargoyles on ledges, and streets that are never wide enough to let in daylight. It is New York of the 1930s with the proportions exaggerated, which is exactly what the original comic artists were drawing from.

That style has two consequences on the page. First, verticals dominate, with the buildings running off the top edge, and coloring them in long unbroken strokes downwards keeps that. Second, everything is lit from below or from one side, by street lamps and windows rather than by the sun.

So the useful approach on any city sheet here: pick one light source, usually the signal beam or a lit window, color everything near it warm, and let the rest go to deep blue-gray. Lit windows should be left as bare paper or filled a pale yellow, and they are the only bright things in the scene.

The gargoyles are not decoration either. Real ones are waterspouts, which is why they lean out from the edge of a roof.

Batman coloring pages for adults

Lots of detail holds the other end, and puts the most crowded page first.

• Batgirl on a fire escape
• A glasshouse full of ferns and orchids
• The hero among the shipping containers

The laboratory bench, the curved desk of screens and the glasshouse of ferns and orchids are the ones to keep for an evening. Flasks, cables, keyboards, leaves: a few hundred separate shapes each. For more pages at that weight, the car coloring pages share the machinery and the cozy coloring pages share the interiors.

Every sheet is a free A4 PDF at 300 dpi, with no sign-up. Print at 100 % scale on A4 or "fit to page" on US Letter, and turn draft mode off, since toner saving turns the black line gray. The printing guide covers paper. Press Add to pack under each sheet you want and print them as one PDF.