Monster Truck Coloring Pages

A monster truck is mostly wheel, and that is what makes it a good thing to color: four enormous tires with tread blocks you can fill one at a time, and a body small enough to finish quickly. These free printable monster truck coloring pages put that truck where it belongs, in an arena, a mud pit, a quarry or a workshop, and give it something to land on.

The bodywork is left plain on every sheet. No names, no numbers, no sponsor panels. That was deliberate: a child who colors one of these invents the paint scheme themselves, and there is nothing on any page that needs reading.

These are busy sheets

Worth knowing before printing for a three-year-old: this collection runs detailed. Arenas have grandstands, worksites have machinery, and even the simplest jump has a ramp and a row of crushed cars behind it. The four cartoon trucks near the end are the ones to reach for at a nursery table, with a grin on the grille and nothing much else on the page.

Lots of detail above the grid holds the crowded end, heaviest page first.

• A truck climbing over a school bus
• A truck covered in wash foam
• A truck tipped up beside a marshal

The workshop scenes are the ones that take an hour: a truck slung from a roof hoist on chains above an inspection pit, racks of spare tires behind it, tools everywhere.

Tires first, then everything else

• Tires in dark gray. Pure black only in the tread gaps and in the shadow under the truck. A solid black tire goes shiny and loses all its tread.
• Color the tread blocks separately. It takes a while on four wheels, and it is the single thing that makes a monster truck sheet look finished.
• Pick one strong body color and stick to it. These trucks are usually one bright color with a contrasting roof, and a body colored in six shades stops reading as a vehicle.
• Suspension springs and shock absorbers take silver-gray with a dark line down one side of each coil.
• Mud is warm brown, uneven, heaviest around the wheels, and thrown up in flecks behind. Leave a little bare paper in it.
• Skies go pale so the floodlight towers and the ramps stand out against them.

Between the runs

A good part of the collection has nothing to do with jumping, and those are the sheets that tend to get colored most carefully. A mechanic leans into an engine bay with the hood propped open and tools on the floor. One huge wheel lies off beside a jacked-up truck. Foam runs off a truck under a hose beside a bucket and a brush. Two crew guide a truck up long ramps onto the bed of its transporter. A crew member sits on a stool holding a pressure gauge against a wheel taller than he is.

They are worth printing alongside the jumps, because they answer the question a six-year-old asks straight after the first sheet: how does it get there, and who fixes it.

Building the arena it lands in

A monster truck sheet is half a picture: the other half is what it is jumping over, and that can be made out of the rest of the pile.

Color two or three trucks, glue them to card and cut them out. Then cut the crushed cars out of another sheet and stand them in a row, and you have the moment before the landing, which is the bit children want to replay. A shoebox on its side, colored inside, does for the stands.

The ramp sheets are worth cutting up rather than keeping whole. A dirt ramp cut out and folded along its base props up at the right angle, and a truck run up it by hand does what no drawing does on its own.

For a wall instead, the four cartoon trucks are the ones to use. Colored in four different bright colors and pinned in a square above a bed, they look like a set that was bought rather than printed.

And if the mud was the best part, keep a colored truck, tape it inside a clear document wallet, and let a child add the mud with a wipe-clean marker as often as they like. The sheet survives; the mud comes off.

For working vehicles rather than jumping ones, the truck coloring pages are next door, and the vehicle drawer holds the rest.

How big those wheels really are

The proportions on these pages look exaggerated and are not, which is worth saying to a child who thinks the drawing is a cartoon.

A competition monster truck runs on tires roughly 1.7 meters tall, taller than most adults, and about a meter wide. They are agricultural tires, originally made for flotation on soft ground, and they are run at very low pressure so they deform over obstacles instead of bouncing off them. That is why they look slightly flat at the bottom in these drawings, and coloring them perfectly round is the commonest mistake.

The truck weighs around four and a half tonnes and the body is fiberglass, not steel, so that it shatters rather than crushes. The suspension has more than a meter of travel, which is why the wheels can be at completely different heights while the body stays level, and why several sheets here show exactly that.

Jumps reach about ten meters high and thirty long. The engines are around 1,500 horsepower and run for only a few minutes at a time.

None of that is needed to color the page. All of it makes the page more interesting to the seven-year-old who asks whether it is real.

For a party table

Print three or four different sheets rather than one repeated, and mix the two ends: the cartoon trucks for the youngest, the arena jumps for the rest. Press Add to pack under each drawing and print the selection as one PDF, adding a few from the truck coloring pages if you want working vehicles in the same pile.

Each sheet is a free A4 PDF at 300 dpi, with no sign-up. Print at 100 % scale on A4, or choose "fit to page" on US Letter so nothing is clipped; the printing guide has the settings.