Truck Coloring Pages

Children who love trucks care about what the truck is for. A tipper has to be tipping, a mixer has to be pouring, a recovery truck has to have something on the hook. These free printable truck coloring pages are drawn on that principle: almost every one of them is a truck in the middle of doing its job, which gives the page a scene as well as a machine.

So the tipper raises its body and pours gravel onto a heap behind a line of cones. The mixer runs its chute down into a shuttered foundation with a barrow beside it. The cherry picker has a worker in the basket changing a street lamp. Cattle walk down the ramp of a slatted lorry into a field. A sweeper turns its round brushes through a drift of fallen leaves at the curb.

Which truck for which child

• Toddlers: the four cartoon trucks at the end. Big eyes on the windscreen, round wheels, nothing else on the page.
• Three to five: the single working trucks with a simple background, like the refuse lorry at the curb and the delivery van at a shopfront.
• Six and up: the sites. The quarry, the building site with the crane, the goods yard, the container terminal.
• Adults: the fire station interior and the workshop scenes.

Press Quick to color above the grid: it keeps the open shapes and starts with the fastest.

• A smiling recovery truck with a hook
• A smiling tipper full of boulders

That band is short here, because most of these pages carry a worksite behind them. For a nursery table, print the cartoon four.

Colors that make a truck look like a truck

• A thin band of bare paper along the top of every panel, with the rest colored evenly. It reads as light on painted metal.
• Windows: pale blue or light gray with one white diagonal stripe left blank. That stripe is what makes glass look like glass.
• Tires in dark gray, not black, with pure black kept for the tread gaps and the shadow under the truck.
• Chrome on bumpers, exhausts and wheel trims: gray and pale blue in streaks with bare paper between.
• Lights: orange on the indicators, red at the back, and a small white spot left blank in each lamp so it looks switched on.
• Keep one strong color per truck. A fire engine is red, a refuse lorry is one color, a tipper is one color. Trucks painted in six colors stop looking like vehicles.

A whole working day

Printed together, the set makes a plausible day, which is a good way to hand them out at a table. Early: the post van at a row of mailboxes, the milk float at a garden gate with a cat on the wall. Mid-morning: the building site, the quarry, the timber lorry. Afternoon: the ice cream van with two children at the hatch, the food truck with its stools out under bunting. Evening: the curtainsider parked in a marked bay under a lamp with a coffee cup on the tarmac.

The monster truck coloring pages are next door for the same child on a different day, and the vehicle coloring pages hold the whole drawer.

A road on the floor, and a page about jobs

These sheets have an obvious second life, and it is on the carpet rather than the wall.

Cut the trucks out once they are colored, glue them to card, and fold a small tab under each set of wheels so they stand. Draw a road on a length of lining paper, or tape sheets of gray paper end to end, and the collection turns into a town: the refuse lorry at the curb, the mixer at the building site, the fire engine outside the station. Children who have just colored a tipper know exactly where it goes.

The working sheets also answer a question small children ask constantly, which is what grown-ups do all day. Print the fire station, the recovery truck, the road sweeper and the post van, color them, and pin them up in a row with one word written under each. It is a better job chart than anything printed for the purpose, because the child made it.

Two smaller uses: a colored truck glued to the front of a folded sheet of card makes a birthday card for the relative who always asks what the child is interested in; and the helmet-and-pads discipline of cutting round wheels is genuinely good scissor practice, which is the real reason nurseries print vehicles.

The monster truck coloring pages stand up the same way, the train coloring pages run along the edge of the same road, and the vehicle drawer holds everything else that moves.

Reading the shapes on a working vehicle

Almost everything bolted to a working truck is there for a reason, and children ask.

The bulge above the cab is an air deflector, shaped to push air over the taller trailer behind. Side skirts do the same lower down. Both save fuel, which is why long-distance trucks have them and local delivery trucks do not.

Mudflaps and side bars stop things being drawn under the wheels. The reflective chevrons on the back of a fire engine or an ambulance are a legal requirement in many places and are drawn as a band of alternating blocks.

A tipper's body pivots at the back and is lifted by a ram behind the cab, which is why the raised body in these drawings tilts from that point. A mixer drum turns constantly to stop the concrete setting, and its spiral inside is what pushes the load out when the drum reverses.

A refuse truck's arms lift and invert a bin in one movement, and the lip they grab is a standard shape across whole countries so that every bin fits every truck.

Crane outriggers are the legs that come down before lifting; without them the truck tips. Several sheets show them, and they are the detail that tells you the crane is working.

The busiest pages, for grown-ups

The second button, Lots of detail, keeps the crowded sheets and leads with the densest.

• A flatbed loaded at a warehouse door
• A livestock lorry unloading cattle
• A mixer pouring into a foundation

The fire station is the one to keep for an evening: an engine inside an open station with coiled hoses on the wall, helmets on a shelf, coats hanging and boots lined up underneath. The quarry and the container yard are close behind.

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; the printing guide covers both. Press Add to pack under the sheets you want and print them as one PDF.