Hot Wheels Coloring Pages

Anyone who has built a track across the living room knows the feeling these pages are about: a small car, a steep ramp, and the second when it either makes the loop or flies off onto the carpet. These Hot Wheels coloring pages are drawn in that spirit, with toy cars racing through the house and the backyard as if both were a stadium.

Most of the pages are stunts. A muscle car flies off a loop with its engine sticking out of the hood, another races around a vertical loop set up on a table, a car jumps between two ramps over a sandbox, leaps over a group of toy dinosaurs on a rug and bursts through a flaming stunt ring. A toy track spirals around a potted plant, a long tunnel runs across the floor, and a play road taped across a bedroom carpet gets its own race while a puppy watches another car loop the loop.

The rest of the garage is here too: a formula car on a curving track and another passing the starting gate, a sports car drifting in a cloud of tire smoke, a hot rod with a huge chrome engine, a dragster waiting at the starting lights, a stock car racing past stacks of tires, a sports car with a big rear wing, a car with gull-wing doors, a classic car on a country road, a tow truck lifting a car and a monster truck climbing a pile of giant toy bricks. A few cartoon cars with faces celebrate the year: a Santa hat and a present, a star on the Christmas tree, a basket of Easter eggs, a heart balloon, birthday candles on a Happy Birthday cake, and a car parked by a snowman.

A small car with a long history

Hot Wheels are die-cast toy cars made by Mattel since 1968. They are small enough to hold in one hand, most of them around 1:64 scale, and they became famous for being fast: the early cars rolled on low-friction wheels, and the bright orange track, with its loops and launchers, turned a table or a staircase into a race course. Many of the models are imagined designs with oversized engines and wild bodywork; others are small copies of real cars, from classic muscle cars to race cars.

That mix is exactly what these pages play with: some cars are realistic, some are pure fantasy, and all of them are doing something they should probably not be able to do.

Coloring a fast car

A few habits make a car look fast on paper:

• Pick one bold body color and keep it. Red, orange, electric blue and lime green are classic toy car colors.
• Add stripes or flames on top once the body is colored: two parallel stripes down the hood and roof, or flames coming back from the front wheels.
• Leave a thin white line along the top of the windows and the roof, as a reflection. It instantly makes the paint look glossy.
• Keep the tires dark and the rims silver or gray, so the wheels stand out.
• Color the track orange, like the real thing, or any color a child likes: it is their race course.

Smoke, fire and motion lines are where kids have fun: yellow and orange for the flames, pale gray for the smoke, and quick strokes behind the car to show speed.

Big cars and busy tracks

The simplest pages put one large car in the middle with little around it, like the cartoon cars with faces. Quick to color, above the grid, begins with:

• Sandbox jump
• Loop the loop
• Drift turn

The detailed ones fill the page with track loops, tires, garage tools and bricks. Lots of detail begins with:

• Tunnel run
• Checkered flag
• Starting gate

A race day at home

These pages work well for a small car party or a rainy afternoon. Print a few stunt pages, let each child color their own car in their team colors, then line the finished pages up on the floor as a "starting grid". Kids can invent a name and a number for each car and write it on the back. If there is a real toy track in the house, pin the colored pages along it as the grandstand.

Printing the grid

Every page is a free A4 PDF drawn at 300 dpi. A4 prints at full size, and on US Letter "fit to page" shrinks the drawing by about six percent so every loop stays on the paper. The printing guide shows the setting. Add to pack gathers a whole race into one file. More vehicles are in the car coloring pages, the monster truck coloring pages, the truck coloring pages and the train coloring pages.