Ninja Turtle Coloring Pages

The four of them are almost always drawn the same way: standing in a row with their weapons out. These free printable ninja turtle coloring pages give them somewhere to be instead, and it turns out most of the good scenes are the ordinary ones. A rooftop water tank with ladders and aerials behind it. A brick sewer with a hammock strung across it. A loft gym of punch bags and ropes. A sofa with all four slumped on it and a tipped tub of popcorn on the floor.

Nothing in the set is drawn mid-fight. The weapons are there, carried and practised with, but the sheets are about skating, eating, training and mending things, which is what makes this collection work for a party table where the children are four and nine at the same time.

Keeping the four straight

The single most useful thing to say before anyone starts: pick one mask color per character and keep it across every sheet. The drawings distinguish them by mask and weapon, so a child who colors consistently ends up with a set that reads correctly, including on the pages where all of them appear at once.

• Two greens for the body. A yellow-green for the plastron at the front, a deeper olive for the shell, arms and legs.
• Darken the seams between the shell plates afterwards, and leave a pale patch near the middle of each plate. The shell turns domed.
• Masks go bright and flat. No shading. The contrast against the green is the point.
• Skin scales: small pale marks outlined in a darker pencil on the forearms and shins, not everywhere.
• Sewer brick looks best in warm gray with every few bricks a shade darker, and the water left almost bare with the ripples as white paper.

Portraits for the youngest, skate sheets for the rest

Press Quick to color above the grid for the roomiest shapes, simplest page leading.

• A close portrait of a masked turtle
• A turtle portrait with a knotted mask
• A rat master kneeling on a mat

That band is short here, because most of these pages carry a city or a sewer behind them. For the youngest, the close portraits are the ones to print: one turtle, one mask, a face filling the page.

Older children go for the skate sheets. They are among the best-drawn things in the set: grinding a handrail down subway steps with pigeons scattering, riding out of a dripping pipe mouth, cutting through a rooftop puddle and throwing up a sheet of water, and running the curve of a round sewer beneath crossing pipes.

Pizza, and the sheets built around it

Several sheets put pizza at the center. Two turtles share a whole one on a rooftop above the skyline, all four sit round another under the moon, a scooter waits in an alley beside a tall stack of boxes, and one shell is drawn as a pizza cut into slices, ringed with masks and leaves. That last one is the sheet to hand a table of children who all want the same thing: it is the fastest in the collection and it still looks like the character.

Masks, bandanas and a box that smells of pizza

Four colors and four characters is a costume waiting to happen, and these sheets are the cheapest way to get there.

Start with the portraits. Printed at the width of a child's face and colored in one flat mask color, they cut down into an eye mask in about four minutes: two eye holes made with a pencil point, two punched holes and a length of elastic. Four children, four colors, no argument about who is who.

The shell sheet does the other half. Print it large, color the plastron at the front, cut it out and tape two loops of ribbon to the top edge so it hangs on the chest like a bib. It is not convincing and it is not meant to be.

For a party table, the pizza sheet earns its place twice: colored and cut into six triangles, it becomes a set of plate mats, and taped to the lid of a real delivery box it turns the box into the centerpiece. Cut the shell-as-pizza sheet into its slices and each guest takes one home.

And the skate sheets, which are the best-drawn in the set, do better on a wall than in a costume box. Three of them in a column above a bed, colored in the same greens, hold together as a set.

The batman coloring pages share the rooftops, the turtle coloring pages have the real animals, and the character drawer holds the rest.

Where the four names come from

Children discover this sooner or later and it is a good moment: the four are named after Italian Renaissance artists.

Leonardo for Leonardo da Vinci, painter of the Mona Lisa and an engineer who filled notebooks with flying machines. Donatello for the sculptor who made the first free-standing bronze since antiquity. Raphael for the painter of the Vatican frescoes. Michelangelo for the sculptor and painter of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

The joke was that four sewer-dwelling characters were named after the most refined artists in European history, and it has quietly introduced several generations of children to four names they meet again later.

There is a small coloring consequence too. Anyone wanting to take it further can look up one painting by each and color that character's mask and surroundings in the palette the real artist used: Raphael's soft blues and reds, Michelangelo's earth tones. It is a genuine art lesson disguised as a coloring page, and it works.

For the drawings themselves, the batman coloring pages share the rooftops and the turtle coloring pages the real animals.

Ninja turtle coloring pages for older kids and adults

Lots of detail takes the other end of the range, heaviest page first.

• A turtle asleep in a sewer hammock
• A turtle skating a stair rail
• A turtle skating a drain tunnel

The rooftop and alley scenes are the ones that take an hour: fire escapes, brickwork, fences, wrecked cars, chimney stacks. Keep the palette narrow, two grays and one warm brown for the brick, and let the four mask colors be the only bright things on the page. The batman coloring pages are the closest neighbors for rooftops at the same weight.

Each sheet is a free A4 PDF at 300 dpi, with no sign-up. Print at 100 % scale on A4, or "fit to page" on US Letter so nothing is clipped; the printing guide has the settings. Press Add to pack under the sheets you want and print the selection as one PDF.