Basketball Coloring Pages

Orange is the one color nobody has to decide on. A basketball is orange with black seams, every child already knows that, and it means the real color choices on these pages happen everywhere except the ball: the court floor, the kit, the backboard, the chain net on the street hoop, the driveway behind it. That is worth saying before anyone starts, because a basketball sheet colored with nothing but an orange pencil looks unfinished. These 32 printable basketball coloring pages split into fourteen simple sheets and eighteen detailed ones, covering balls, hoops, courts, shoes, kit, gear, drills and players in action. Every design downloads as a free printable PDF sized for US Letter paper.

The fourteen simple sheets keep one object in the middle of the page with thick outlines. Basketball With Bold Seam Lines is the place to start with a preschooler, and it is the only page in the set where the seams run wide enough to color rather than just trace. Basketball Hoop With a Net is the plain basketball hoop coloring sheet, drawn straight on so the rim reads as a circle instead of an ellipse. Basketball Going Through the Hoop and Basketball Bouncing on the Court add movement without adding detail, and Ball Stuck in the Rim shows the one thing every driveway player has argued about. Kid Holding a Basketball and Kid Shooting at a Mini Hoop are the two with a child in them, and the mini hoop sheet suits the age group that actually plays on one.

Four of the simple sheets are gear rather than game. Pair of Basketball Shoes and Basketball Jersey and Shorts both come drawn blank, with no number and no team name, so they ask a child to invent something rather than copy it. Gym Bag With Ball and Shoes is the same idea with more to fill. Whistle and Coach's Clipboard and Basketballs on a Ball Rack cover the practice side, and the rack is quietly useful, because six balls on one page let a child try six different shading pressures and compare them side by side. Basketball Scoreboard leaves its team panels empty on purpose, and Basketball With Confetti is the one to print at the end of a season.

The net is the part most people get wrong. Cord has no color of its own, so what makes a net look like a net is leaving the strands white and darkening the small diamonds of space between them. Coloring the cord and leaving the gaps white does the opposite and produces a solid white cone. A chain net works the other way around, because metal does have a color, so the links themselves take a light gray with a darker gray on their lower curves and the gaps stay white.

The eighteen detailed sheets put figures on a court. Player Making a Slam Dunk and Player Shooting a Free Throw are single figures with a lot of drawn muscle and fabric fold, so they suit a child who wants to spend an hour on one page. Layup Off the Backboard, Crossover Dribble and Player Shooting a Three Pointer cover the three moves a young player is most likely to be learning right now. Wheelchair Basketball Player carries the most interesting geometry in the set, because the cambered wheels lean inward and the spokes give a child a genuinely hard shape to work around. Girl Dribbling Down the Court and Player Holding Up a Trophy both make good end-of-season keepsakes.

Group and sideline scenes fill out the rest. Two Players Blocking a Shot at the Rim and Team Huddle Before the Game are the crowded ones, and the huddle carries five separate kits to tell apart. Coach Drawing Up a Play and Half Court Line Drills show practice rather than a game, and the drills sheet doubles as a diagram of what a half court actually contains. Referee Making a Foul Signal is the only striped shirt here, and the stripes arrive already filled in, so the decisions on that page are the shorts, the shoes and the floor behind him. Crowd Cheering in the Stands holds dozens of small figures and rewards a child who wants to give every single one a different shirt. Team Bench and Water Bottles and Driveway Basketball Hoop are the quietest sheets in the set, with no people in them at all, and Street Court With a Chain Net sits between the two, with a fence and cracked asphalt to break up. Basketball Court Seen From Above takes the longest, and it teaches the most, because a child who colors it comes away knowing the layout of a court.

Court color decides whether the indoor pages look real. An indoor floor is pale maple, so a light tan or yellow ochre laid down evenly across the whole surface lands much closer than any brown. The painted lines on top of it stay bright white, which means leaving them alone from the start rather than trying to lift them out later. The lane, the rectangle under each hoop that players call the key, is usually painted a solid contrasting color, and filling that one shape does more than anything else to turn a flat court into a real one. Outdoor courts break every one of those rules, so the street, driveway and drills sheets take a flat mid gray for asphalt with lines that fade into it instead of staying crisp.

The kits are the other thing to settle early. Every jersey and pair of shorts in this set is blank on purpose, with no team, number or mark, so a child can put their own school colors and their own number on the page. On the group sheets, give the two sides clearly different jersey colors and keep the court paler than both, and the figures stop merging into the floor. The crowd sheet is the exception worth planning, because coloring every fan a different bright color turns the stands into noise. Picking two or three colors and repeating them across the rows reads as a real crowd.

Related line art: Playground, Back to School and Summer.