Aircraft Coloring Pages
15 free printable pages, ready to download and print.
Free printable aircraft coloring pages featuring airliners, fighter jets, biplanes, helicopters, and hot air balloons.
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Aircraft are drawn against sky, which makes them the set where leaving the background white does the most damage. A jet on a white page is a diagram; the same jet against a graded blue with its vapor trail left as bare paper is a photograph. These 15 aircraft coloring pages cover airliners, fighter jets, helicopters, seaplanes, hang gliders and hot air balloons. Every design downloads as a free printable PDF sized for US Letter paper.
Hot Air Balloon Floating Over a Countryside Landscape is the most colorful and the easiest. Fighter Jet With Vapor Trails Soaring High and Commercial Airliner at Cruising Altitude are the two best sky exercises. Helicopter Rescue Operation Lifting a Person and Seaplane Landing on a Calm Mountain Lake have the most going on.
Sky is a gradient, not a flat color. Press hardest at the top of the page and ease off steadily toward the horizon, where it should be almost white, that is genuinely how the atmosphere looks, and it takes about two minutes. Leave clouds as bare paper with a soft gray along their undersides only.
Beyond the headline aircraft, the set covers the slower end of flying and the military end. Vintage Biplane Doing a Loop-De-Loop in the Sky, Small Propeller Plane Flying Over a Farm and Crop Duster Plane Spraying Fields are the propeller pages, where bright period paint schemes are historically correct rather than invented. Hang Glider Soaring Over Mountain Peaks, Paraglider Soaring Over Coastal Cliffs and Blimp Floating Over a Sports Stadium cover the unpowered and lighter-than-air end. Military Stealth Bomber in Flight is the one page where near-black is the right answer, and WWII Formation of Bombers Flying in V Shape has the most repeated shapes to work through.
More in this direction: Transportation, Outer Space and Emergency Vehicles.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you color a sky behind an aircraft?
As a gradient. Use one blue and vary the pressure: heaviest at the top edge of the page, lightening steadily downward until the sky is nearly white at the horizon. Do not scrub, build it in two or three even layers. Leave clouds and vapor trails as untouched paper, adding only a light gray along their shaded undersides.
What is a vapor trail?
A contrail, a line of ice crystals formed when hot, humid engine exhaust hits very cold air at altitude and condenses, much like breath on a winter morning. It is water, not smoke, and it appears white. Leaving it as bare paper against a colored sky is the only way to get it right.
Which aircraft pages suit young children?
The hot air balloon and the airliner are the simplest, with large clean shapes and few internal lines, and work from about age four. The helicopter rescue and the seaplane on a lake have more detail in the rotors, floats and background, and suit ages seven and up.
How do you color metal aircraft bodies?
Keep it light and let the shape do the work. Use a pale gray or silver across the fuselage, leave a bright unbroken highlight running along the top of the body where it curves toward the light, and deepen the underside considerably. Aircraft are polished surfaces that reflect the sky, so a hint of blue along the upper fuselage is accurate.