Anime Style Coloring Pages
18 free printable pages, ready to download and print.
Anime-style coloring pages featuring original chibi characters, magical girls, anime warriors, and expressive anime scenes.
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Anime style is a set of specific drawing conventions rather than a single look: eyes enlarged and simplified, the nose reduced to a suggestion, the mouth small, and the hair drawn as a few large sculpted masses instead of individual strands. Once you know those rules, coloring within them is straightforward. These anime style coloring pages are original characters with no licensed properties, spanning warriors and ninjas, princesses and chefs, dragons, mermaids and chibi group scenes. Each downloads as a free printable PDF sized for US Letter paper.
Anime Girl With Long Flowing Hair is the best introduction to hair as shape rather than texture. Anime Boy With a Spiky Hairstyle makes the same point more sharply, since each spike is a flat plane with a clear light side and dark side. Anime Cat Girl With Cute Ribbons adds accessories and is the one children pick first.
Anime hair is where a page is won or lost, and the technique is unlike anything else on this site. Do not blend. Choose two tones of one color, fill each hair mass with the lighter tone, then lay the darker tone underneath and along the sections in shadow with a hard edge between them. That visible boundary, called cel shading, is the entire look. Softening it makes the drawing look like a Western cartoon instead.
Skin and eyes follow the same logic as the hair. Anime skin is usually one pale base with a single deeper tone placed under the chin, along the side of the neck and beneath the fringe, again with a hard edge rather than a blend. The eye is the one place to spend real time: the iris is darkest at the top where the lid casts a shadow and lightest at the bottom, with one or two circles of bare paper left as catchlights. On Anime Girl With Long Flowing Hair the eyes take up enough of the page to make that layering easy to see, which makes it the best sheet to learn on. Unnatural hair colors are entirely conventional in the style, so blue, lilac and mint are all correct choices rather than liberties.
More in this direction: Robots, Superheroes and Fairy Tales.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you color anime hair?
With two flat tones and a hard edge between them. Fill each hair mass in the lighter shade, then add the darker shade underneath the fringe, behind the ears and along any section turned away from the light, keeping the boundary crisp rather than blended. A stripe of white or very pale paper left across the crown reads as the highlight anime hair always has.
What is cel shading?
A shading method that uses a small number of flat tones with hard edges between them instead of a smooth gradient. It comes from hand-painted animation cels, where each color was a separate opaque layer. It is the defining look of anime and it is much faster to execute than blended shading.
Are these based on any anime series?
No. Every character here is original, so there is no established palette to match and nothing licensed to worry about for classroom or personal use.
What does chibi mean?
It is a deliberately shortened proportion used for comic effect: an oversized head on a small body, roughly two or three heads tall instead of the seven or eight of a realistic figure, with the features simplified further still. Chibi Anime Characters Standing Together uses it, and the large flat areas it produces make that one of the quicker sheets here to finish.