There is a very specific flavor of exhaustion that hits around 4 PM on a Thursday. You just need the kids to sit down and stop arguing over who gets to hold the iPad. I told my illustration team to just draw some goofy starfish.
The result is this nice batch of free Patrick Star coloring pages that actually saved my sanity yesterday. My youngest spent an hour just coloring his shorts neon green.
It is honestly wild how a simple cartoon can reset the whole mood of a house. I just print out a stack of these printable Patrick Star coloring pages and suddenly everyone is quiet.
You don’t need a fancy setup or expensive art supplies to make this work. Just grab whatever broken crayons are rolling around in the bottom of the drawer and let them go at it.
Your kids will also love: SpongeBob, Squidward, Mr Krabs, Sandy Cheeks.
Patrick Star Coloring Page Highlights
Patrick Doing Complex Math
Patrick is sitting at a wooden desk wearing these ridiculous thick glasses and holding a giant pencil. There is a blackboard behind him covered in math problems that honestly look harder than my oldest son’s homework.
It is a hilarious scene for kids who appreciate the irony of the dumbest character acting smart. Having the team draw all those little chalk numbers gives the kids plenty of tiny details to focus on.
Eating Pizza in One Bite
He is literally shoving an entire giant slice of pizza into his mouth while standing in front of SpongeBob’s pineapple house. You can see the stringy cheese stretching and his eyes are just wide open in pure gluttony.
It is, let’s say, not the most polite table manners. But handing them a Patrick Star coloring pages for kids like this is guaranteed to get a laugh out of a grumpy toddler.
Board Nailed to His Head
This one is just classic pure Patrick where he has a literal wooden plank stuck to his forehead. He looks completely blank and confused while standing near some coral reefs.
Finding a picture with this level of blank-stare energy is exactly why I wanted our artists to tackle this set. They can use lots of nice brown textures for the wood grain on the plank.
Acting Tough at the Salty Spitoon
Patrick is crossing his arms and trying to look incredibly intimidating right in front of the Salty Spitoon door. The anchor on the door and the brick walls give it a really gritty underwater feel.
He clearly doesn’t belong in a tough club but he is trying his best. This specific Patrick Star coloring sheet is brilliant for practicing shading on his angry furrowed brow.
Crying Literal Waterfalls
This is a massive close-up of his face just absolutely bawling with waterfalls of tears streaming down his cheeks. The water is pooling around him while he wails into the ocean.
I tell my kids to use three different shades of blue to make the tears look wet and heavy. It is a very dramatic image that captures toddler meltdowns perfectly.
Doing a Painful Gym Split
He is sweating bullets trying to do a full split on the floor of a very intense-looking gym. There are dumbbells and a heavy punching bag hanging in the background.
You can almost hear the ripping sound just looking at his poor legs. Providing funny fitness themes usually gets my boys talking about their own gym class.
Crawling Through the Hot Sand
Patrick is dragging himself across a barren desert looking completely parched under a blazing hot sun. There are little cacti in the background to really sell the whole drought situation.
The sand dunes stretch way back into the horizon. It might cause some inconvenience trying to find enough yellow crayons but the final result looks fantastic.
Caveman Patar Discovering Fire
This is Patar the caveman version of Patrick wearing a little animal skin outfit and discovering a campfire. He is sitting in a dark cave with little prehistoric fish swimming outside.
The fire is a great excuse to bust out the neon oranges and bright yellows to make it glow. All this history comes down to one thing: cavemen look hilarious in pink.
Tips for Coloring Patrick Star Coloring Sheets
1. Nailing the Starfish Pink
Patrick is not a soft delicate baby pink. He has this very specific coral salmon color that borders on orange depending on the lighting of the episode. If your kid just scribbles with a hot magenta crayon he ends up looking like a neon sign.
I always suggest starting with a peach base and then lightly layering a standard pink over it. This creates a much more authentic starfish texture that looks heavy and real. When you are printing out these free Patrick Star coloring pages you want the end result to actually look like the TV show.
Sometimes we even mix a tiny bit of orange near the edges to give his arms some actual volume. And what follows from this? A drawing that actually pops off the paper.
2. The Infamous Green Shorts
His shorts are iconic but they are a nightmare to color if you don’t plan ahead. The bright lime green fabric clashes horribly with the dark purple flowers if you use cheap muddy markers.
I tell my middle child to always color the purple flowers first before filling in the green background. If you do the green first the purple marker will just bleed into it and turn black.
It is exactly like managing CSS z-indexes… you have to layer the elements in the correct order. Leaving a tiny sliver of white between the purple and green might cause some inconvenience but it keeps the colors crisp.
3. Managing the Deep Blue Sea
A lot of these scenes happen outside in the ocean. Bikini Bottom water is not a flat boring sky blue . . . it has weird tropical gradients that shift from turquoise near the sand to deep navy at the top.
I probably find around 12-13 broken blue crayons under the rug every week. Encourage the kids to blend two or three different blue colored pencils for the background.
When they work on these printable Patrick Star coloring pages it really helps to color the water horizontally. This mimics the actual ocean currents and makes the blank space feel alive. Will this work tomorrow? No idea. But today it looks great.
4. Texturing the Sand and Coral
The ground in these drawings is usually just sand and some scattered coral reefs. Do not let them color the sand a flat yellow because it will just blend in with SpongeBob if he is in the picture.
Use a light tan or khaki color and then add little dots of brown for texture. The coral is where they can actually go completely wild with their color choices.
Undersea plants can be bright purple or neon green or even bright red. It is, let’s say, not the most scientifically accurate approach. Or rather it is perfectly accurate for a cartoon world.
5. Capturing the Facial Expressions
Patrick makes the absolute weirdest faces out of anyone in the show. He is either crying waterfalls or staring blankly into space with zero thoughts in his head.
The secret to making these expressions work is leaving the whites of his eyes completely uncolored. If they accidentally smudge pink into his eyes he just looks tired and sick.
Whenever we do Patrick Star coloring pages for kids I make sure they outline the eyes with a black pen first. This creates a hard boundary that keeps the messy crayons where they belong. All this detail work comes down to one thing: keep the eyes clean.
6. Using Shadows for Weight
Patrick is a very heavy round character. If you just color him a flat pink he looks like a paper cutout floating on the page. You need to add a darker pink or a light purple under his belly and under his chin.
This grounds the character and gives him some physical presence in the scene. A good Patrick Star coloring sheet always looks better when you establish a clear light source. I don’t have an exact answer here for every single drawing. Just pick a side for the sun and stick to it.