Playground Coloring Pages

Playground scenes are almost all groups of children, which makes them different from most of this site: the pages are about several figures interacting rather than one subject in the middle. That has a practical upside, hand one large printed copy to three children and each can take a different figure. These 15 playground coloring pages cover slides, swings, the jungle gym, the seesaw, the sandbox and the merry-go-round. Every design downloads as a free printable PDF sized for US Letter paper.

Children Playing on a Colorful Slide and Children Balancing on a Seesaw are the two simplest compositions. Kids Climbing a Jungle Gym Together and Children Spinning on a Merry-Go-Round have the most figures and take the longest. Kids Playing in a Sandbox Building Sandcastles is the quietest scene in the set.

With several children on one page, the thing that makes it work is giving each one a distinctly different outfit color and sticking to it. Real playground equipment is primary-colored for the same reason, bright, high-contrast, easy to tell apart at a glance, so leaning into that is accurate as well as effective.

The detailed sheets add the games that happen around the equipment rather than on it. Friends Playing Tag at Recess, Kids Playing Hopscotch With Chalk and Kids Kicking a Ball in the Park are the running-around pages, and the hopscotch sheet is the one where the chalk grid should stay pale, since chalk on tarmac is never fully opaque. Children Hanging From Monkey Bars, Kids on a Zip Line at an Adventure Playground and Children Twirling Hula Hoops are the busiest, and Children Building a Fort From Playground Equipment is the longest project in the set.

Equipment color is the other thing worth settling before anyone starts. Slides, frames and swing seats on a real playground are molded plastic in flat, saturated primaries, so they take an even fill with almost no shading, whereas the metal poles and chains behind them are a plain gray with a hard highlight down one side. Keeping those two materials clearly different, flat color for the plastic and sharp contrast for the metal, does more to make the equipment look solid than adding any amount of extra detail to the children on it.

Related line art: Basketball, Back to School, Birthdays and Summer.