How to Print Coloring Pages

The first page I printed for my daughter came out missing its right edge. A unicorn with no tail. I fixed the scaling and the next print was so faint the lines looked penciled in, and the print after that smeared into gray mush the second a marker touched it, which is a chemistry problem and took me the longest to figure out. Three failures, three unrelated settings.

Twenty minutes of fiddling eventually got me a saved preset on our HP Envy that has worked ever since. This guide is those twenty minutes written down, plus what I learned later about paper and toner. And about getting pages you colored on a screen onto actual paper, which works a bit differently.

Settings before anything else

Six things matter in the print dialog. The rest can stay wherever the driver left them.

Scaling. Fit to page. Cut-off edges almost always come from "Fill page" or "Borderless" modes, which zoom in slightly to eliminate margins and chop the design in the process. If a project needs exact dimensions, fold-and-cut stuff mostly, use Actual size instead.

Paper size. Letter in the US, A4 nearly everywhere else, and whichever one the driver says has to match what's physically in the tray. We spent a month printing pages with a fat white stripe down one side because the setting said A4 and the tray held Letter. Felt dumb..

Quality. Normal or High. Draft mode prints line art like a dying pen.

Color mode. Grayscale. You get cleaner blacks and your color cartridges live longer. Some drivers actually lay down a richer black in grayscale than in color mode, which makes no sense to me, but I've watched it happen on two seperate Canons.

Enhancements. Off. Anything named Photo smoothing or Vivid was built for photographs, and the Edge enhancement checkbox is the sneakiest of them, since it thickens line art while claiming to help. Ours was buried three menus deep in the driver.

Duplex. Also off. Marker pressure telegraphs straight through a two-sided print.

Print one test page, then save all of this as a named preset. Most Windows and Mac print dialogs let you. Mine's called "coloring pages" and I haven't touched a setting since spring.

The file itself

A PDF holds its sizing and sharpness the most predictably, and a PNG is nearly as good. JPGs tend to have been compressed and resaved somewhere along the way, so fine lines come out slightly hairy. For a full Letter or A4 print you want at least 1500 pixels on the long edge, more like 2500 for detailed designs, and if the lines already look fuzzy zoomed in on your screen, no printer setting going to rescue them. Download the file and print from a viewer rather than printing the browser tab directly, at least for most cases, because browsers stamp a URL and date into the margins unless you go uncheck "Headers and footers."

Inkjet ink and markers do not get along

This one cost me a whole afternoon. Our inkjet sprays water-based ink, Crayola Supertips are water-based markers, and the marker re-wets the printed line and drags it across the page as gray smudge. Even the washable ones do it. Colored pencils and crayons are safe because there's no water in them, though heavy burnishing with a waxy pencil can lift ink too, I've had that happen exactly once. If you're stuck with an inkjet and your kids love markers, print the stack a day ahead, because the ink needs a full 24 hours to cure into the paper before it stops reactivating.

Laser printers skip the entire problem. Toner is dry plastic fused on with heat, so you can color over it immediately with anything, and alcohol markers that would dissolve an inkjet line don't touch it. If there's a laser at your office or library, use that one for coloring pages. Our marker bleed-through guide goes deeper on which markers do what.

Paper weight

Plain copy paper covers crayons.
Colored pencils start rewarding 28 to 32 lb paper once you're layering and blending. The extra tooth grips more pigment and the surface pills much later. How to shade with colored pencils explains why layers matter.
Markers want 32 lb minimum with a scrap sheet behind the page.
Cardstock. 65 lb, rear feed slot, one sheet at a time, and switch the paper type setting to "Cardstock" so the rollers adjust their grip.

For specific brands and weights there's a full rundown in best paper for printing coloring pages.

Printing pages you colored on a screen

Digital pages have their own flow. When you finish something in the online coloring tool, export it as a PNG and print that copy in color mode, since grayscale would obviously flatten all the work. Grandparent fridges have received a lot of these. If a sibling wants the same picture on paper, print the original line art instead for a clean black-and-white blank, and a quiet little trick for younger kids is printing the finished colored version right next to a blank copy so they have a reference to work from while they color.

A page that isn't finished yet deserves a real save, to a file, instead of trusting the browser. The tool writes a small .colorstate file you can load again later, even on a different device if you move it over with email or a USB stick. Auto-save is convenient right up until someone clears browser data or the school laptop gets wiped over the weekend. A file survives that.

If there is no printer in the house

The library. Almost every branch has one, it's usually a laser, and black-and-white prints are free or pennies.

Office supply stores take a PDF upload or a USB drive and will happily print on cardstock your home printer would jam on. And if you ask Staples or FedEx Office for an "engineering print," you get a 24x36 inch black-and-white sheet for around four dollars, which is a stupid amount of fun taped to a wall at a birthday party (we did three of them once, the kids colored for over an hour and ignored the actual games). Skip the pharmacy photo kiosks for line art, the output is built for photos and the lines come out soft.

When it comes out wrong

"The edges got cut off"

Fill page or Borderless is on. Switch to Fit to page and double-check the Letter/A4 mismatch mentioned earlier, since a size mismatch produces the same weird cropping.

"The lines are faint or broken"

Draft mode, almost every time. If Normal quality is still faint, the source file may have gray lines rather than black, and bumping contrast in any image editor, even the Photos app on a phone, darkens them without thickening them.

"It smeared when we colored"

Fresh inkjet print plus water-based marker. Wait a day or find a laser.

"It printed sideways"

Set orientation to Portrait yourself. Auto-detect gets square images wrong often enough that I don't trust it.

Watch someone do it

More printing walkthroughs:

FAQ

Should I print in color or black and white?

Grayscale for blank line art. Color only when you're printing a finished piece someone colored digitally.

How long do inkjet prints need to dry?

Crayons and colored pencils can start within minutes. Water-based or alcohol markers need the ink fully cured, so give it 24 hours. A blow dryer on low speeds things up but I'd still leave the stack overnight.

Can I print coloring pages I find online?

Depends on the usage rights, so check each site. Ours are fine for personal and classroom use. Browse the collection if you need a starting point.

Is a laser printer worth buying just for this?

If markers are a daily thing in your house, honestly maybe. A basic Brother mono laser runs about $100 and the toner lasts thousands of pages. Occasional printers are better off at the library.

How do I print poster-size pages?

Adobe Reader has a Poster mode that tiles one image across sheets you tape together, seams visible but free. The cleaner route is that engineering print from an office store.

Pick something from animals or space, print one test page, and save the preset. The holidays category will be there when December hits.