LEGO Coloring Pages

Every child who has ever stepped on a brick in bare feet knows these shapes. These LEGO coloring pages draw the whole world of the brick: the minifigures, the things built from bricks, and the bricks themselves.

The minifigures come first: a blank one standing with its arms out, a big head with two dot eyes and a smile filling the page, a builder in a hard hat carrying a brick, a knight with a shield in front of castle walls, an astronaut on the Moon beside a small rocket, and a diver in a round brass helmet among brick seaweed. Others sit on a park bench under a lamp post, shake hands in front of a little house, line up as a family of four, and bake a layered brick cake as a chef.

The builds fill the rest. A small house with a sloped roof, a castle with three flagged towers, a fire station with its truck, a row of market stalls, a steam train on its track, a propeller plane on a runway, a boat on studded water, a space shuttle on its launch pad, a windmill, a lighthouse, a tree and a flower in a pot. Brick animals and machines: a dog sitting up, a cat asleep beside its bowl, a tall robot with claw hands, and a rocket half built with the wrench and loose bricks still around it. And the bricks on their own: a single classic brick, a wall of studs seen from above, a plain brick wall, a tub tipped over with bricks spilling across the floor, bricks sorted into trays, a hand pressing one more brick onto a wall, and the brick separator every builder reaches for.

A brick from 1958 still fits

The name comes from two Danish words, leg godt, "play well". The company started in 1932 in a carpenter's workshop in Billund, Denmark, making wooden toys, and the plastic brick with tubes underneath, the one on these pages, was patented in 1958. The clever part is that the design never changed: a brick made that year still clicks onto one bought today. The minifigure arrived in 1978, with the same round head, dot eyes and smile as the big head on this page.

One more fact that children love: six ordinary bricks of the two-by-four kind, the one on the single-brick page, can be put together in more than 915 million different ways. And a small point of grammar that the company itself insists on: they are LEGO bricks, never "Legos".

Coloring bricks so they look like plastic

Real bricks come in strong, flat colors: red, blue, yellow, green, white and black are the classics. Choose one color per brick and press evenly, because plastic has no texture and uneven coloring makes a brick look like wood.

The detail that makes a drawing look like a real brick is the shine. Leave a small white curve on the top of each stud, as if light were catching it, and color the rest of the stud the same color as the brick. On the single brick, color the top face a little lighter than the sides and the page suddenly looks solid.

The minifigure heads are the one place to think twice. The classic minifigure face is yellow, chosen long ago as a color that stands for nobody in particular, so every child could imagine it was anyone. Many newer figures use real skin tones instead. Either is right, and a family of four minifigures colored to look like the child's own family is one of the nicest uses of these pages.

Which pages for which builder

The pages run from a single shape to scenes packed with pieces. The simplest are the big minifigure head, the standing figure and the plain walls, which suit a child of four or five. Quick to color, above the grid, starts with:

• LEGO minifigure head
• Plain brick wall pattern
• LEGO minifigure standing

The densest are the builds with many parts and the scenes full of loose bricks: the market stalls, the spilled tub, the fire station and the castle, and the studded wall where every stud is its own circle. Lots of detail begins with:

• Wall of studded LEGO bricks
• LEGO castle with towers
• LEGO fire station and fire truck

Color it, then build it

The builds on these pages are simple enough to copy with real bricks. Color the house, the windmill or the dog first, choosing the colors from the bricks the child actually has, then use the page as instructions and build the same thing. It works the other way too: build something, then color the matching page to plan a new color scheme before rebuilding it.

The two brick walls, the studded one and the plain one, make good mosaic grids. Instead of coloring every brick the same, pick out a picture: a heart, a smiley face, the first letter of a name, a flag. Colored bricks form the shape, the rest stay a background color, exactly the way people make brick mosaics on a baseplate.

A LEGO birthday table

For a LEGO party, print a different page for each guest and put a small handful of real bricks next to each one, so children can color and build at the same seat. The chef with his brick birthday cake is the page for the birthday child. The minifigure head, colored and cut out, makes a quick mask or a name card for each place.

Printing a set of pages

The pages download as free 300 dpi PDFs sized for A4. An A4 printer takes them at 100 %; a US Letter printer needs "fit to page", which costs the drawing about six percent of its size and not a single stud. The printing guide shows the option. Tap Add to pack under the pages you want and print them together. Blocky worlds carry on in the Minecraft coloring pages and the Roblox coloring pages, and the train coloring pages suit a child who built the steam train.