Look, my kids go through strange television obsessions faster than I can possibly keep up. One day it’s intense anime ninjas and the very next morning it’s bossy talking pigs.
It is honestly exhausting trying to consistently find decent cartoon coloring pages… that don’t cost a small fortune.
So I finally just had my design team start drawing them from scratch. We make exactly what we need now.
We ended up with a massive pile of sheets covering pretty much every weird phase. It is honestly the only way I survive the afternoon slump around here.
Just print out a thick stack and throw some crayons on the table. It might cause some inconvenience if they fight over the favorite characters but at least it is quiet.
Cartoon Coloring Page Collections
Featured Cartoon Coloring Pages
Cartoon Coloring Pages Highlights
Minion Smiling with One Eye
This little guy is standing in front of a chaotic background of bananas and big gears. I have no idea why they love these weird yellow dudes so much. But Sam will literally spend an hour just coloring all 47 of those tiny background bananas.
It is a great page for practicing some basic patience. You have the big simple shapes of the minion right next to the dense background patterns. Just let them go completely wild.
Naruto Uzumaki Eating Ramen
Here is Naruto just going to town on a massive bowl of ramen. He has his chopsticks ready and you can clearly see the whole ramen stand behind him. It honestly makes me hungry just looking at the noodles.
There are some neat details like the lanterns and the foreign writing up top. Older kids really get into getting the exact right colors for his ninja outfit. Or perhaps they just color the entire bowl neon green.
Peppa Pig Dressed as a Queen
Peppa is looking very regal wearing a crown and a big cape while holding a little scepter. There is a tiny stone castle resting on a hill in the background. Lily used up three whole pink crayons on this exact page just last week. The dog threw up this morning.
Anyway, the lines are incredibly thick and simple here. It is absolute perfection for toddlers who are just learning to grip a crayon without snapping it in half. Plus those puffy clouds are basically just big easy circles.
Phineas and Ferb Building a Roller Coaster
These two brothers are wearing hard hats and closely studying blueprints for a giant roller coaster. You can even see Perry the Platypus just chilling back there. I swear these kids build better infrastructure than my actual city council.
This one has a lot of rigid straight lines with the wooden coaster tracks. It is like scaffolding a lesson plan—you need a solid foundation before you throw the flashy stuff at them. Let them color the complicated blueprints some weird neon color.
Pikachu Smiling with Lightning Cheeks
It is just classic Pikachu standing outside happily with some tall flowers and clouds. He has little lightning bolts on his cheeks which is a really cute touch. The guy looks ridiculously happy to be there.
Be prepared for the only yellow crayon to get worn down to an absolute nub. The big open spaces on his face make it super easy for the little ones. Maybe try teaching them to use light green for the grass below.
Pink Panther Leaning on a Wall
He is casually standing there looking cool and leaning against a tall brick wall. There is a classic street lamp and a metal trash can right next to him. It feels very old school and laid back.
Coloring all those individual bricks takes forever. Which is honestly exactly what you want when you are trying to fold a massive mountain of laundry. Just hand them a pink marker and a red one and let them figure it out.
Pink Panther Painting a Room Pink
The Pink Panther is wearing messy overalls and a painter’s cap while rolling paint onto a blank wall. He has all his painting gear set up with a tall ladder and open cans on the floor. It is kind of ironic when you think about it.
The random paint splotches on the floor are super fun to color. Kids usually completely ignore the whole pink concept and make the spilled paint rainbow colored. And honestly who am I to stop their creative vision.
Po Dressed as a Ballerina
This is just completely hilarious. Po the Panda is doing a full graceful ballerina pose while wearing a tiny tutu. He is surrounded by all these tall thin bamboo stalks.
It is surprisingly hard to color a panda since they are technically mostly black and white. But the tutu gives you a perfect excuse to use some violently bright colors. The bamboo is also great for practicing mixing different shades of green.
Tips for Coloring Cartoon Coloring Pages
1. The Yellow Crayon Problem
A lot of these cartoon characters are aggressively yellow. Minions and Pikachu will absolutely destroy your primary yellow crayon in about 12 minutes flat.
I always try to keep a secret stash of backup yellows hidden away. Sometimes I show Lily how to mix a light orange with white to make a fake yellow.
2. Managing the Black Outlines
Characters like Pink Panther and Peppa have very specific and thick black outlines that our illustrators use. Kids get super stressed when they accidentally color over the lines and ruin the whole look. I tell them to trace the inside of the black line with their crayon first.
It creates this little physical wax barrier that helps keep the scribbles contained inside the shape. All this math comes down to one thing: don’t overcomplicate it. Just build a wall and color inside it. They figure it out eventually.
3. The Anime Hair Challenge
Anime characters like Naruto have hair that completely defies all known laws of physics. It is all sharp angles and weird spiky shadows that confuse kids. And what follows from this? The fact that all previous logic goes to hell.
Do not let them just color it completely flat yellow. Show them how to press hard at the tips and fade out. Will this work tomorrow? No idea. But today it works.
4. Dealing with Huge Backgrounds
That roller coaster page has a massive amount of empty white space in the background. Kids look at all that open sky and just give up halfway through the project. I usually tell Sam to break it up into chunks.
If they do the background first it somehow makes the main characters pop more. This might cause some inconvenience if they just want to color the fun parts. But the final result is always better when the sky is not just dead paper.
5. Making Bricks Look Real
The brick wall behind the Pink Panther can be totally overwhelming for small hands. Coloring 93 tiny separate rectangles is a whole lot of work for a tired kindergartener. I teach them to grab three different crayons and just randomly scribble.
They can drag a dark red and a brown across the rows. It is like balancing a spreadsheet where the messy data somehow equals a perfect total. The wall ends up looking textured and real without demanding perfect precision.
6. Getting the Right Pink
Finding the absolute perfect shade for Peppa and Pink Panther is strangely difficult. The standard pink crayon is usually way too bright or looks exactly like cheap bubblegum. When you’ve corralled thirty first-graders you learn to improvise.
I just take a red colored pencil and have them color really softly instead. It gives you a much better pastel look. Just don’t let them press down hard or you suddenly have a glowing neon pig.