34 Cat Coloring Pages (Free PDF Printables)

Most cat coloring pages are a cat sitting still. Six of these are. The other twenty-eight have the cat on a skateboard, in a spacesuit, holding a sword, or spray painting a wall.

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Thirteen designs give the cat a job or a hobby: skateboarding, guitar, graffiti, a games controller, a bicycle, a chef’s hat, an easel, a book, a dance, a hammock, a tea party, a selfie and a tower of building blocks. Four are full costumes, with angel wings, a warrior’s sword, an astronaut suit and a wizard’s hat. Seven are kittens rather than grown cats, and four more are a cat with a single prop: headphones, sunglasses, a balloon, a butterfly to chase.

Every one of these cat coloring pages is free. Each design prints on standard US Letter paper, there is no sign-up, and the cat coloring sheets can be printed as many times as you need. Click any design below to open the full-size PDF.

What’s in This Collection

The six realistic cats

A tabby, a fluffy study, a portrait, one curled asleep, one at the window and one waving a paw. The tabby is the one worth getting right. Those stripes are not a breed, they are a coat pattern that turns up across dozens of breeds, and it is the closest thing to the original wild coat that every domestic cat descends from.

Seven kittens

A yarn ball, a cardboard box, a drum kit, a swing, bubbles, a slide and a teddy bear. The box page is funnier than it looks. Cats sit in boxes because an enclosed space lowers their stress, which is also why a cat will settle inside a square of tape stuck to the floor.

Cats with a job

Thirteen designs, the biggest group here. Skateboard, guitar, spray can, games controller, bicycle, chef, easel, book, dance, hammock, tea party, selfie and building blocks. The selfie page has something real behind it: cats avoid eye contact with each other because a direct stare reads as a threat, so a cat looking straight down a lens is doing the one thing it would never do to another cat.

Costumes and fantasy

Angel wings, a warrior with a sword, an astronaut and a wizard. These four have the most to fill in and the most freedom in them, because nothing about the color is fixed. They are the four to hand an older child who finds a plain cat too easy.

One cat, one prop

Headphones, sunglasses, a balloon and a butterfly. The butterfly page is the most natural thing in the set. Chasing something small and moving runs the same hunting sequence a cat uses on a mouse, which is why a laser pointer works so well on them, and also why it leaves them unsettled, since there is nothing to catch at the end of it.

Coloring Tips

Tabby stripes wrap around the body. On the tabby and the realistic cats the markings are not straight lines down the page. They curve around the ribs, break at the shoulder and ring the tail. Following the shape of the animal rather than the edge of the paper is what makes the pattern sit on a cat instead of floating above one.

Leave a white spot in each eye. Every cat here has large round eyes, and filling them in solidly kills the face immediately. One small patch of bare paper near the top of each eye, always on the same side, is the single change that makes the cat look alive rather than stuffed.

Fur is a direction before it is a color. On the fluffy cat, the portrait and the sleeping one, short strokes all running the same way down the body read as fur. A flat even fill reads as plastic. The direction matters more than which pencil you pick.

Real cats come in a narrow range, invented ones do not. If a child wants the realistic pages to look right, orange, gray, black, white and cream cover almost every cat alive. Save the blue and the purple for the wizard, the astronaut and the warrior, where nothing is fixed and anything works.

Start younger children on the kittens. The yarn ball, the box, the swing and the teddy bear have the fewest lines and the largest open shapes, which suits a three or four year old. The tea party, the street artist and the astronaut have the most small pieces to work around and are better saved for someone older.

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