Printing coloring pages at home should cost almost nothing. The pages on this site are free, and a sheet of printer paper is cheap. The one thing that quietly runs up the bill is ink, which, drop for drop, is one of the most expensive liquids most of us ever buy. The good news is that coloring pages are about the easiest thing there is to print cheaply, because they are simple black line drawings meant to be colored in. A few small changes to your settings can cut your ink use dramatically. Here is how I keep home printing nearly free.
Print in black and white, not color
This is the single biggest saver, and most people miss it. A coloring page is a black outline on a white background. Your child supplies all the color with crayons and markers, so there is no reason to touch your expensive color ink at all.
Before you print, open your printer settings and look for a “Color” option, usually a dropdown. Switch it to “Grayscale” or “Black and white,” which some printers call “Black ink only.” Now the page prints using only your black cartridge, which is far cheaper to replace than the color ones. On many printers, printing in color when you only needed black quietly draws down all the cartridges at once, so this one change avoids that entirely.
Switch to draft or economy mode
The second big saver is print quality. Your printer defaults to a “Normal” or “High” setting designed for photos and documents you want to look crisp. A coloring page does not need any of that. It is about to be scribbled over with crayon.
In the same settings menu, find “Print Quality” or “Quality” and choose “Draft,” “Economy,” or “Fast.” This lays down noticeably less ink per page. The black outlines will look every bit as good for coloring, and you will get far more pages out of every cartridge. For coloring pages, draft mode is all you ever need.
Download the PDF and print from that, not the web page
How you print matters as much as the settings. If you hit print directly from a web page in your browser, you often get more than you wanted: website headers, navigation, ads, and sometimes a blank second or third page, all using ink and paper you did not need.
The clean way is to download the coloring page as a PDF first, then print from the PDF. Every page on this site is a free PDF download for exactly this reason. A PDF is just the coloring page itself and nothing else, so what you see is what prints. One page, no clutter, no surprises.
Always glance at the print preview
Before you click print, look at the preview that appears in the print window. This five-second habit catches the most common ink-wasters before they happen: a design scaled too large and spilling onto a second page, an accidental blank page, or the wrong page entirely. If something looks off, fix it in the settings before you commit. A quick preview has saved me countless wasted sheets.
If a design looks like it will run off the edges, find the “Fit to page” or “Scale to fit” option and turn it on, so the whole thing lands cleanly on one sheet.
If you print a lot, look at the printer itself
Everything above works on any printer you already own. But if you print coloring pages constantly, a whole family’s worth or a classroom’s, the printer itself becomes the real lever. Standard inkjets are cheap to buy and expensive to feed. If you are replacing cartridges often, two options save serious money over time: a black-and-white laser printer, which costs more upfront but has a far lower cost per page, or a refillable tank style inkjet that uses cheap bottled ink instead of pricey cartridges. Neither is necessary to start. But if printing has become a weekly habit in your home, the math tends to favor the upgrade within a year.
Print freely, color often
Put these together, black ink only, draft quality, and straight from the PDF, and a printed coloring page costs you a few cents at most. That is the whole idea. Printing should never be the reason you say no to one more page. Set these once, and you can print as many as your kids can color.
Ready to fill up the paper tray? Browse our free printable coloring pages, all available as clean, single-page PDF downloads.