Table of Contents
Ice cream is drawn far more often than it is drawn accurately. Most ice cream coloring pages are a cone with three circles balanced on it. This set goes after the shapes that actually exist, a split banana under three scoops, a taco made of wafer, ice cream scraped into rolls off a frozen plate, a scoop dropped into soda. There are 45 designs.
Seven are cones and soft serve, ten are sundaes and bowls including two banana splits, five are on a stick, and seven are sandwiches, tacos and rolls. Five more are milkshakes, floats and frozen cakes. Eight show where it comes from, a truck, two carts, a bicycle, a children’s stand, a seller, a scoop being lifted and a gelato counter. The last three are days out. Every group is described under the grid.
Every one of these ice cream coloring pages is free. Each design prints on standard US Letter paper, there is no sign-up, and the ice cream coloring sheets can be printed as many times as you need. Click any design below to open the full-size PDF.
What’s in These Ice Cream Coloring Pages
Cones and soft serve
A plain swirl, one under sprinkles, one at a carnival, a boy holding one, a dripping waffle cone, a cone with a flake pushed in, and a girl with one far too big for her. Soft serve is not a different recipe from scooped ice cream so much as a different amount of air, roughly half of what comes out of the machine is air whipped in, which is why it is soft enough to pour and why it melts so much faster than a scoop.
Sundaes, bowls and splits
Three sundaes, a puppy eyeing a fourth, a bowl of three scoops, a waffle bowl, two friends sharing, a squirrel with its own, and two banana splits. The banana split is the most precisely dated thing in this set. A 23-year-old apprentice pharmacist named David Strickler put one together in Latrobe, Pennsylvania in 1904, and the layout he chose, banana halved lengthways, three scoops in a row, has barely changed since.
On a stick
A bitten popsicle, a giant one, a twin, a chocolate-shelled bar and a drumstick rolled in nuts. The chocolate shell on the bar is worth knowing about before coloring it: it is made with coconut oil rather than butter, because coconut oil is liquid at room temperature and hard below it. That is the only reason a shell can be poured on warm and still crack when you bite it.
Sandwiches, tacos and rolls
An ice cream sandwich on its own, a cat with one, a grandmother handing one over, two tacos including one held by a robot, and rolled ice cream in a cup with the chef making it. Rolled ice cream started as street food in Thailand, where liquid cream is poured onto a plate kept well below freezing, spread thin, and scraped up with a spatula into curls as it sets.
Milkshakes, floats and frozen cakes
Two milkshakes, a float, an ice cream cake and a slice of ice cream pie. The float is the oldest idea here, a Philadelphia soda seller dropped vanilla into a glass of soda water in 1874 and the combination spread fast enough that within a few years it had its own name in most of the country.
Where it comes from
A truck, a pushcart, the same cart lit up at night, a bicycle cart, a stand run by children, a seller, a scoop being lifted, and a gelato counter. Gelato is the odd one on that list. It has less cream and much less air than ice cream, and it is kept several degrees warmer, which is why it looks dense in the display and tastes stronger than a scoop of the same flavor.
Days out
The beach, a pineapple hollowed out and filled, and a fairy with a cone the size of her hand. These three are the only ice cream coloring pages in the set with a place rather than a dessert as the subject. The pineapple page has an odd fact behind it: vanilla, the flavor most of these designs are assumed to be, comes from the seed pod of an orchid, and outside of Mexico every single flower has to be pollinated by hand because the insect that does it naturally lives nowhere else.
If it is the food rather than the sweets, the food coloring pages run much wider, and the summer collection puts these in their season. The animal designs here sit well beside the dog coloring pages, and the truck and carts have plenty of company in the car collection.
Coloring Tips
The drips are what make it look cold. On the dripping waffle cone, the melting soft serve and the sundaes, the runs down the side are the most important part of the drawing. Color them a shade lighter than the scoop they came from, not the same, because melted ice cream is thinner and paler than the solid part. Filling a drip with the same pencil as the scoop makes it read as a lump rather than a run.
Leave vanilla as bare paper. Vanilla is not a color you can put down. The moment it is filled in it stops looking cold and starts looking like butter. Leave it white, put a light gray only where one scoop sits in the shadow of another, and it will read as vanilla on every page in this set without a single pencil touching it.
A waffle cone is a texture before it is a color. There are six cones here and they all live or die on the same thing: the criss-cross. Color the cone a mid-brown first, then go back over the raised squares with a darker brown and leave the grooves as they are. Doing it the other way round, or skipping it, turns a waffle cone into a plain paper one.
Sprinkles come last, and fewer than you think. On the sprinkle soft serve it is tempting to fill every single one. The page looks better with four or five colors used sparsely and plenty of white left between them, because that is what real sprinkles look like from a distance. Doing them last also means a slip does not ruin the scoop underneath.
Give every scoop its own flavor. The bowls, the banana splits and the gelato counter all have several scoops in one drawing, and the quickest way to make them dull is to color them all the same. Pick a different flavor for each, one pale, one bright, one dark, and the drawing does the work of looking like a real display rather than a stack of circles.
Start younger children on the ones on sticks. The popsicles, the twin, the chocolate bar and the drumstick are single objects with very few lines, which suits a three or four year old. The gelato counter, the parlor sundae, the children’s stand and the ice cream truck have the most detail and the most separate pieces, and are better saved for someone older.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are these ice cream coloring pages really free?
Yes, all 45 are free to download and print. Click any design to open the PDF. No account, no email, no payment.
What age are these ice cream coloring pages for?
The whole range, but they lean young. The popsicles, the bars and the single cones have big open shapes that suit children from around three. Most of the set works well from four to eight. The gelato counter, the parlor sundae and the ice cream truck have enough detail for older children.
Can I use these in a classroom?
Yes. These ice cream coloring pages are free for personal, educational and classroom use. They work for topics on solids and liquids, on melting, and on running a shop, the children’s stand page in particular.
Can I print more than one copy?
As many as you need. The ice cream coloring sheets can go out to a whole class or a birthday party without asking.
What is the difference between ice cream, gelato and soft serve?
Air and temperature, mostly. Ice cream has a good deal of air churned into it and is kept hardest. Soft serve has far more air, close to half its volume, which is why it is soft enough to come out of a nozzle. Gelato has the least air and less cream, and is kept warmer, which is why it looks dense in a display case and tastes stronger.
Who invented the popsicle?
An eleven year old. In 1905 a boy named Frank Epperson left a cup of powdered soda and water on a porch in San Francisco with the stirring stick still in it, and the night turned cold enough to freeze it solid. He pulled it out by the stick. He kept making them for friends for years, and only patented the idea in 1923, by which time he was a grown man with children of his own, who, the story goes, were the ones who talked him into it.
Leave a Reply