Anime Coloring Pages

Hair you can actually colour

Most anime coloring pages arrive with the hair already filled in solid black, because that is how anime hair is normally drawn. It looks right on screen and it ruins a colouring page — the largest, most satisfying shape on the whole sheet is printed for you before you start. On every page here the hair is left open, divided into separate strands by thin outlines, so it is yours to colour. The same goes for the school uniforms, the samurai's kimono, the traveller's cloak, the robot's armour plates and the night sky behind the witch.

Original characters

There are no famous characters in this set and that is deliberate. Anime is a drawing style, and everyone on these pages was invented for them — the girl with the flower clip, the boy with the headphones, the four friends walking to the festival in their yukata. It means nothing here is a traced copy of somebody else's work.

A blank manga page

One sheet is laid out as a real manga page: six panels of different sizes telling a short wordless story, and inside every panel a speech bubble left completely empty. Colour the panels, then write your own dialogue in the bubbles and the story becomes yours.

Faces and expressions

The expression sheet is six chibi faces with six different hairstyles — a bob, twin tails, a ponytail, a spiky cut, a braid and a bun — pulling six different faces: happy, surprised, sleepy, winking, crying and sulking. It is the page children come back to, because the faces are small enough to finish one at a time.

Easy through to detailed

The first six pages are chibi characters with thick outlines and big open shapes for younger children. The middle nine are full scenes — the cafe window seat, the shrine visit, the cherry blossom walk to school — that will hold a school-age child for half an hour. The last five are for older colourists: the doodle page of thirty small drawings, the festival crowd under the lanterns, the witch above the rooftops, the kimono and koi page with its patterned fabric and outlined scales, and the manga page.

Print the whole set at once

The button at the top bundles all twenty into a single download. Print at 100% scale rather than “fit to page”, and match the file to your paper — Letter or A4. Markers need 120gsm cardstock.