Looney Tunes Coloring Pages

The Looney Tunes gang has been chasing, tricking and outsmarting each other for close to a century, and the classic gags translate beautifully to paper. These Looney Tunes coloring pages bring back the whole cast, each doing the thing they are famous for.

Bugs Bunny leans on a fence with a carrot, relaxes in a hammock between two palms, scrubs up in a wooden washtub, carries a pot of carrots through his garden, conducts an orchestra of forest animals in a top hat, and stands in a horned Viking helmet and braids with a spear. Daffy Duck dances wildly by a pond, leads a crowd of ducklings, floats in a polka-dot pool ring, fishes from a rowboat, pulls Bugs out of a top hat as a magician and shares a sundae with him at the soda fountain.

The famous pairs are here too. Tweety sits in the birdcage by the window, flies circles around a living room lamp and perches on top of a sleeping Sylvester, who creeps along a windowsill and eyes her over a bowl of birdseed. Road Runner races along the desert road and vanishes in a cloud of dust, while Wile E. Coyote plans with a coil of rope under a giant boulder and rides an ACME rocket off the edge of a cliff. Porky Pig waves from the stage and rides his bike through a village, Foghorn Leghorn stands by the henhouse and lectures a little chick over the fence, Taz spins through a pile of leaves and hugs a stack of pancakes, Speedy Gonzales dashes past the cheese, Elmer Fudd tiptoes through a carrot patch with a net, and Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog start another working day in the sheep field. A bulldog naps by his doghouse and meets a bouncing puppy, and a mandala of bunny faces and carrots rounds out the collection.

Where the gang came from

Looney Tunes began in 1930 as a series of short cartoons made for Warner Bros. to play in cinemas before the main film, alongside a sister series called Merrie Melodies. The characters arrived one by one over the next quarter century. Porky Pig was the studio's first real star in the mid-1930s, Daffy Duck turned up in 1937, and Bugs Bunny made his official debut in A Wild Hare in 1940, asking "What's up, Doc?" for the first time.

Tweety and Sylvester were paired in the late 1940s, and the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote first raced across the desert in 1949, in a series by director Chuck Jones in which the coyote never speaks and never, ever wins. Foghorn Leghorn, Speedy Gonzales and the Tasmanian Devil followed, along with Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog, two colleagues who clock in each morning, spend the day as enemies and clock out as friends. Most of the voices came from a single actor, Mel Blanc.

The Viking page comes from one of the most celebrated shorts of all, What's Opera, Doc? from 1957, in which Elmer Fudd hunts Bugs through an opera and both end up in Viking costume.

The gang's colors

Every character has a color scheme that viewers know instantly:

• Bugs Bunny: gray with a white face, belly and feet, pink inside the ears.
• Daffy Duck: black with an orange bill and feet and a white ring around the neck.
• Porky Pig: pink, with a blue jacket and a red bow tie.
• Tweety: bright yellow with blue eyes and orange feet.
• Sylvester: black and white, with a red nose.
• Road Runner: blue and purple with orange legs; Wile E. Coyote is brown with a tan belly.
• Taz: brown with a tan face and belly.
• Foghorn Leghorn: white with a red comb and a yellow beak and legs.
• Speedy Gonzales: brown, with a yellow sombrero, white shirt and red scarf.

The desert pages look best in warm oranges and reds under a pale sky, which is what the Road Runner cartoons are painted in.

Easy classics and busy scenes

Several pages keep a single character large with very little around them, which suits a young child who knows Bugs or Tweety from the screen. Quick to color, above the grid, begins with:

• Tweety and Sylvester
• Foghorn and the chick
• Tweety's perch

The detailed pages fill the background with a garden, a village, a forest orchestra or a crowd of ducklings. Lots of detail begins with:

• Porky's bike ride
• Maestro Bugs
• Taz tornado

A cartoon afternoon

Looney Tunes are made for sharing across generations: parents and grandparents grew up with the same characters. Watch a short together, then print the matching pages: the Road Runner and the coyote after a desert chase, Tweety and Sylvester after a birdcage caper. Children love inventing a new gag for the coyote, a new ACME gadget drawn on the back of the page that is certain to backfire. Finished pages can end with the famous line written across the bottom: "That's all, folks!"

Printing the gang

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 ear and tail stays on the paper. The printing guide shows the setting. Add to pack gathers a whole cartoon afternoon into one file. More classic cartoon favorites are in the SpongeBob coloring pages and the Snoopy coloring pages, and more rabbits and ducks in the bunny coloring pages and the duck coloring pages.