Car Coloring Pages

A car drawn side on, alone on a white page, is quick to color and quickly forgotten. These free printable car coloring pages park the car somewhere, which gives a child a road, a sky and a story to fill in as well. The race cars leave their numbers blank for a driver to invent, the police cars have light bars worth getting right, and the classic cars wait outside diners and flower shops in full scenes that keep older kids and adults busy. Cartoon cars with big eyes are here too, for the youngest.

A sixties muscle car waits outside a roadside diner, a hatchback sits stuck in deep snow with a shovel beside it, and a station wagon carries a roof box and a bike. Mechanics change tires at a pit stop, rally cars splash through a muddy ford and fly over a crest, and a police car chases another car between tall buildings. For sports cars and cool cars, there is a sports car on a winding mountain road and a futuristic concept car on a showroom turntable. Everyday cars get their moment too: a taxi passing shop fronts, a small car squeezed into a parking space, a classic car disappearing under suds at the car wash.

Which car pages suit a toddler?

The cartoon cars: a chunky smiling car, a taxi, an ambulance and a convertible with a surfboard, all on plain backgrounds. Press Quick to color above the grid to keep the easy car pages with big shapes, which suit toddlers and preschoolers. The quickest of them right now:

• A cartoon police car
• A cartoon taxi
• A race car with blank number circles

From about five, one vehicle with a little background works well: the race car with blank numbers, the rally car on a snowy forest stage, the police car parked by a fire hydrant.

Designing your own race livery

The race car coloring pages keep their number circles blank, and the drag racer has a blank timing board. That turns the page into a design job. Pick two main colors and one accent, run a stripe from the nose over the roof, and put the number in the accent color with a dark outline so it reads from across the room. Invent a team name for the side and a sponsor or two for the rear wing. The two cars on the starting grid make a good sheet for two children, one livery each. For a checkered flag, mark every other square with a dot before filling it in black, so the pattern does not drift halfway across.

Getting the police lights right

Children ask for police car coloring pages because of the lights. Color the light bar red on one half and blue on the other, leave a small white spot in each lamp, and the car looks switched on. Emergency vehicles vary from town to town, so the same police car can be black and white, or white with bright blue and yellow panels: ask the child what the ones on their street look like. The fire chief car has a star on the door that takes gold well, and the ambulance outside the hospital has a stretcher by its back doors.

How to color a car so it looks like metal

• Leave a thin band of paper uncolored along the top of each panel, just under the roofline, and color the rest evenly.
• Windows take a light gray or pale blue, with one white diagonal left blank.
• Tires look better in dark gray than in solid black; keep black for the gaps in the tread.
• Chrome on the classic cars is gray and pale blue with streaks of bare paper between them.

Colors for a fifties classic

The vintage and classic cars are where the set slows down. Fifties colors suit them: mint green, cream, pastel pink and sky blue, often with a white roof, and chrome bumpers left mostly bare. A fifties car waits at an old gas station with round clock pumps, and a round-backed classic parks outside a flower shop. The vintage roadster beside a picnic comes with trees and a blanket to fill. Lots of detail keeps these full scenes, with every flower pot and brick drawn in. The densest of them right now:

• A fire chief car by a fire hydrant
• A hatchback in a driveway
• A vintage roadster at a picnic

The vintage pickup full of pumpkins makes an autumn page, and the wedding car with ribbons and tin cans makes a card for a couple.

A car party that keeps kids busy

For a car-themed birthday, print one race car per guest and ask each child to use their age or their lucky number on the car. Tape a long strip of paper down the table, draw a road on it with a marker, and park the finished cars along it before cake. Put a few cartoon cars in the stack for younger siblings. To make a car coloring book for the party bags, press Add to pack under each drawing, and the whole selection prints as one PDF. The pack keeps sheets from other collections too, so it can take a few Paw Patrol pages or anything else in the full catalog. Cars are one collection in the vehicle coloring pages, the drawer for everything with wheels. The most famous black car on the site is not here but in the batman coloring pages, parked on a rooftop with its canopy open.

Why cars stopped looking like each other

The classics in this collection look nothing like the modern cars, and the difference is not fashion alone.

Fifties cars had fins, chrome and huge glass areas because steel was cheap, fuel was cheap, and nobody was testing what happened in a crash. The chrome bumper was solid and the body was soft. Color those sheets with plenty of bare paper for chrome and a single strong body color, because that is how they were sold: one flat color, sometimes two split along a line down the side.

Modern cars are rounded because of air and impact. A smooth shape uses less fuel, and a crumpling front end absorbs a crash rather than passing it to the people inside. The gaps between panels are narrow, the glass is smaller, and the whole thing is usually one color with dark trim.

Rally cars get their raised suspension and mud flaps because the surface changes every few hundred meters. Police cars are a normal car with the lights, the bar and the markings added, which is why the police sheets here are the same shapes as the everyday ones.

One practical note that follows: a modern car takes fewer colors and more shading, an old one takes flat color and more bare paper for the brightwork. Coloring both the same way is what makes a page of cars look like a page of toys.

No badges, no manufacturer artwork

The cars are drawn in the style of real classes, a sixties muscle car, a modern hatchback, a single-seater racer, without badges or model names. That leaves the color and the number up to whoever is holding the pen.

The car coloring sheets are free printable PDFs at 300 dpi, with no sign-up and no watermark. They are A4; on US Letter, choose fit to page. The printing guide covers paper and settings.