My Little Pony Coloring Pages

A pony standing on empty paper is colored in five minutes. These free printable My Little Pony coloring pages catch a pony in the middle of something instead: a cake half iced, a fence half painted, a stack of library books one volume from falling over. That is what keeps a child at the table once the mane is done, and it gives an older fan of the show a scene to work on rather than a sticker outline. Familiar ponies from the show appear by name, next to ponies a child gets to name themselves.

Across the My Little Pony coloring sheets, Pinkie Pie mails a letter into a tall street mailbox and opens a wooden chest full of toys. Applejack hammers a birdhouse together on a workbench and laces her skates beside a frozen pond in a snowy forest. Fluttershy hops across stepping stones in a stream and rakes leaves the wind keeps scattering. Rainbow Dash balances along the top of a low brick wall, and Twilight Sparkle reads in a hammock strung between two trees. Then come the ponies of your own naming: one rowing a boat near a wooden dock, one in a chef's hat kneading dough, one sharing an umbrella with a small dragon in the rain.

Getting each pony's colors right

The named ponies come from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and each one has colors a fan will check you on. Twilight Sparkle has a lavender coat and a dark purple mane with a pink and violet streak. Rainbow Dash is sky blue, with a mane striped red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. Pinkie Pie has a pink coat and a curly mane in a deeper pink. Fluttershy has a pale yellow coat and a long soft pink mane, and Applejack is orange with a blond mane tied at the end and her brown cowboy hat.

Keep a picture of the pony open on a phone beside the page; it settles arguments. The unnamed ponies are free. A child can match them to a favorite from the show or invent a new pony with a name and colors of their own, which is often the more popular choice.

Horns, wings, or neither

The set is drawn the way the show is built: some ponies have a horn, some have wings, and earth ponies have neither. The unicorn ponies blow bubbles over a clipped garden hedge, count coins into a piggy bank, poke a log fire in a brick hearth and photograph a butterfly on a daisy. The winged ponies wind a kite string, slide down a playground slide, wash a pair of muddy boots and knock at a round front door under a lantern.

A child who wants a horn above all can go on to the unicorn coloring pages, with more manes and more horns.

Coloring a rainbow mane

The manes are drawn as separate strands, so a rainbow mane needs no special technique: fill one strand red, the next orange, and keep going in rainbow order, the same order as Rainbow Dash's mane. Where a strand is wider than a pencil stroke, color it lightly first and press harder along the outer edge, and it reads as a curl without any shading.

Eyes are the one place to leave a small white dot uncolored. The ponies have very large eyes, and that single dot is what makes the face look awake.

Which pages for a five-year-old, and which for a fan?

Quick to color above the grid keeps the pages with one pony and little behind it, drawn with thick outlines. They are the easy My Little Pony coloring pages for a young child or a short sitting.

• Pinkie Pie posting a letter in a mailbox
• Scootaloo winding a kite string in a field
• Fluttershy hopping between stepping stones

Lots of detail keeps the kitchens, gardens and the library, with shelves, flowers and toys to fill. Those suit an older child with an afternoon, or an adult who grew up with the show and wants something to work on with colored pencils.

• Twilight Sparkle stacking books in a library
• Pinkie Pie opening a chest of toys
• Pinkie Pie hanging lanterns on a fence

A pony party, with a friendship twist

Press Add to pack under any drawing, then print everything you picked as one PDF. One named pony per guest, stapled with a couple of unnamed ones, makes a small My Little Pony coloring book for a birthday or a sleepover. Since the show is about friendship, try having each guest color one page for the friend sitting next to them and swap at the end. The pack stays in your browser, so the Barbie sheets or the princess pages can go in the same print.

Manes, tails and how to color hair that flows

The hair is most of the drawing on these pages, and it is where a page is won or lost.

A flowing mane is drawn as overlapping strands, not as one shape. The way to color it is one strand at a time, each with a slightly different pressure, and to leave a band of bare paper running along the top of the biggest curve as a highlight. That single bare band is what makes hair look glossy instead of flat.

If a child wants a multi-colored mane, which most do, the trick is to keep the colors in the same order down the whole length and to keep each band the same width. A rainbow mane colored at random looks like a mistake; the same colors in a repeating order looks designed.

The bodies are flat pastel and need almost no shading, only a slightly darker tone under the chin, along the belly and behind the legs.

Two more details these designs always carry: large eyes with a white highlight that must be left as bare paper, and a mark on the flank that identifies the character, which is small and worth coloring last with a sharp pencil.

Getting a clean print, and who drew these

The sheets are free printable PDFs at 300 dpi, with no watermark and no account. They are A4: print at 100 % on A4 paper, or choose fit to page on US Letter; the printing guide has the rest.

All of these are original drawings made by fans, not screenshots and not official artwork. The character drawer holds the rest of the names children ask for.