Printing

How to print coloring pages

19 August 2026 · 7 min read

Two settings cause nearly every ruined printout — scaling and quality. The fix for each, the paper worth buying, and how to make a home printer produce a clean black line.

Almost every ruined printout comes from one of two settings. Fix those and the rest of this page is optional.

The two settings

Scaling — set it to 100%. The print dialog defaults to Fit to Page or Shrink oversized pages, and both of them resize the artwork to what the printer thinks it can manage. Sometimes that shrinks the page and leaves a white frame; sometimes it enlarges it and eats the outer ring of the design. Find the scaling control and set it to 100% or Actual Size.

While you are there, check the paper size matches the file. US Letter is 8.5 × 11 inches, A4 is 210 × 297 mm, and they are not interchangeable. A Letter file printed on A4 loses about half an inch off the bottom; an A4 file on Letter comes out slightly small with an uneven margin. Neither is the printer's fault.

Quality — take it off draft. Economy and draft modes lay down less ink, which turns a black line grey and slightly broken. Set quality to Normal or High. It is slower and uses more ink, and it is the difference between a line you can colour up to and a line you keep going over.

That is genuinely most of it.

If the line is still wrong

Grey, broken, or missing in patches after you fixed quality — that is a clogged head, not a setting. Run the printer's own nozzle check and cleaning cycle; two passes usually do it. Inkjets clog when they sit unused, which is exactly what happens between colouring sessions.

Black looks brownish or has a colour fringe — the printer is mixing colour inks to make black. Look for Black ink only or Grayscale in the dialog. Truer black, and dramatically less ink.

Fine lines near the centre disappear — either the file is low resolution, in which case nothing on the printer will help, or you are printing at draft. If the file is 300 DPI and quality is high and the centre still mushes, the page was drawn badly. How to pick good printables covers checking that before you spend the paper.

Paper

Coloured pencil: ordinary 80 gsm copier paper. This is not a compromise — cheap paper has a tooth that takes pencil layers well, and it is what most of these pages are designed for.

Fineliners, gel pens, alcohol markers: 120 gsm or heavier, and put a spare sheet underneath. Alcohol markers go through nearly everything and will mark whatever is below.

Watercolour pencils or a wash: proper watercolour paper, 200 gsm or more. Anything lighter cockles into ridges the moment it gets damp, and the ridges do not flatten out.

Worth knowing: heavier paper is not automatically better. Very smooth heavy card feels luxurious and holds pencil poorly, because there is no tooth for the pigment to catch on.

Printing from a phone or tablet

This is where most cropping happens, because the mobile print sheet hides the settings that matter.

On iPhone or iPad, open the file in Files rather than in the browser preview, then Share → Print. Pinch to zoom on the preview thumbnail and you will see the actual page area; if the design is touching the edges of that preview, it will be cropped. The paper-size control is behind Options at the bottom of the print sheet, and it is usually set to whatever was last used.

On Android, the print preview appears first and the settings are collapsed under a small arrow at the top. Open it and check Paper size and Scale. Android's default scale is often "Fit to page", which is the setting to change.

The reliable workaround on either: do not print from the browser. Download the PDF first, open it in a real PDF viewer, and print from there. Browser print paths re-render the page and are the single largest source of soft, resized and cropped output.

Saving ink without ruining the line

Colouring pages are mostly white, so they are cheap to print — but a few habits help if you print in quantity.

Black ink only is the big one, as above: no colour cartridges consumed at all.

Do not use draft to save ink on line art. It saves very little and costs you the crisp edge, which is the one thing the page needs. If you want to economise, print fewer pages properly rather than more pages badly.

Two small things that help

Print two at once when you are testing. If you are trying a new paper or a new setting, put two copies on the sheet at reduced size first. You find out what the settings do without committing a full page.

Keep a margin sheet. The half-inch border on a well-made page is the right place to test a colour before you commit it to the middle. If your pages have no margin, they were designed for a screen.

Printing our pages specifically

Everything in the library is 300 DPI, US Letter, with a half-inch margin all round, which means: scaling 100%, paper size Letter, quality Normal, grayscale or black-only. Nothing else to configure.

If you are outside the US and your printer only holds A4, print at 100% anyway — you will get a slightly larger blank margin at the sides and lose nothing from the drawing, because the artwork does not run to the edge. That is what the margin is for.

Each page is a narrative mandala printed with its own reading: what the objects are, where they sit, and what the arrangement is doing. Once the printing is sorted, coloring techniques covers what to do with the hour.

Browse them at the library — three are free.

Three pages, free

Every page in the library is a narrative mandala printed with its own reading — what the objects are, where they sit, and what the arrangement is doing. 300 DPI, US Letter, half-inch margin. Pick any three.

Choose my free pages See the books

Common questions

Why do my coloring pages print cut off at the edges?

Because the print dialog is scaling to fill the paper. Set scaling to 100% or Actual Size rather than Fit to Page, and make sure the paper size in the dialog matches the file — a US Letter file sent to A4 will always lose something.

Why do my printed lines look grey instead of black?

Usually draft or economy mode, which sprays less ink. Set quality to Normal or High. If the lines are still grey and broken, it is a clogged print head rather than a setting, and a nozzle clean will fix it.

What paper should I use for coloring pages?

Ordinary 80 gsm copier paper is genuinely fine for coloured pencils. Markers bleed through it, so use 120 gsm or heavier. Watercolour pencils need real watercolour paper or the sheet will buckle.

Should I print coloring pages in black and white or grayscale?

Grayscale, and if your printer offers it, black ink only. That gives a truer black than mixing colour inks and it uses far less ink, which matters if you print a lot.