Cats have complex fur of many colors. You need a large crayon or colored pencil selection to create accurate colors, so you can create accurate looking fur that shows the variety of shades of actual fur when you color the free printable coloring sheet selections to which we link.
Welcome to our collection of free CAT coloring pages. Click the cat pictures or illustrations you like and you’ll be taken to the PDF download and/or print page. Every cat coloring page is a printable PDF and/or can be downloaded.
More Animal coloring collections: Cheetah Coloring Pages | Deer Coloring Pages | Cow Coloring Pages | Monkey Coloring Pages | Pig Coloring Pages | Lion Coloring Pages | Bunny Coloring Pages | Fox Coloring Pages | Puppy Coloring Pages | Sheep Coloring Pages
Cat Coloring Pages Overview
Wax-based crayons and pencils work best for blending colors on your pet drawing or printable coloring page. Keep your colors sharpened, so you can create fur folds and fine fur as well as whiskers. This gets tougher to do if the picture has more than one cat, such as a mother cat and kittens.
Choose a mid-tone color to begin the fur of your cute cat in the coloring book or that you printed from online. Use light pressure to draw in the darkest fur areas. Make your fur look realistic by using drawing strokes that follow the bone or muscle in an actual cat of that breed. Reference photos of actual cats to learn what each breed’s fur looks like. Use lighter and darker colors of pencils or crayons to create the highlights and lowlights. Follow the direction of the fur on an actual feline whether a kitten or full grown warrior cat.
Once you have established the fur pattern, add layers. Remember to shade as you would an actual animal sitting in the lighting situation in the picture or drawing. You might purchase a cat breed book, so you can reference photos of an actual feline of that breed.
Color in your highlights and shadows on cute cat coloring page. Lightly apply your colors and build the layers, so you achieve realistic textures and colors. Change the length of your brush/pencil strokes to create short or long hair for various breeds fur. Follow the direction of the fur. This can be tough to do on a leopard because of its spots.
Perhaps you want to make a line drawing more interesting and you want to color a calico cat. Pick a female name for your cat because calico coloring only occurs in the female gender of felines. Inside the line drawing on the coloring page, draw a few different sized circles in black and orange. Make some of them ovals and others make circles. Intersect one or two of these shapes.
You can instantly create a visually interesting background by printing your printable coloring pages on colored paper. Choose black construction paper or printer paper if you want to add interest and start with a solid color as your background. Using colored paper does
Regardless of the type of colored pencils or crayons you use, you will need to blend your colors. This means that you smudge the colors onto one another using your finger or a small piece of clean, white paper. You use white paper because you need to see how much of the color has come off of the paper and you will need to change the scrap of paper you use to smudge periodically.
Cats have multiple layers of fur. Their outermost fur layer, guard fur, provides the longest layer, but does not show the cat’s coloring. Their skin actually exhibits color. Guard fur provides their longest fur. It protects the feline from cold weather and absorbs water, so the feline does not instantly become soaked. Beneath this fur lies their down fur which provides their insulation. Their breed determines how thick this fur becomes. When a cat gets cold, this extremely soft layer stands up to let warm air travel under it to their skin. If you have seen a tabby cat shed during summer, it was their down fur they lost. Between these two layers, the awn fur joins the guard and down. It is thinner than down fur, as well as longer, but thicker and shorter than guard fur. You need to color or sketch in these various layers to make the cat’s fur look real. You can use various thicknesses of colored pencils or crayons. Whiskers typically are clear or white. You can draw these by using a white pencil against a colored background.
Whether a cat has long or short hair in their fur, most cats have straight fur. Curly fur occurs very rarely. Long-haired breeds have fur that grows to 1.5 and five inches with a wide range of patterns and colors. This provides you with a wide selection of colors you can use to color their pictures. Most cats fall into the short-haired category. Their fur grows at most to about 1.5 inches and exhibits less color difference. A so-called hairless cat actually has velvety, extremely short fur, essentially the feline equivalent of a short buzz cut for a human. These felines typically have a solid fur color with little to no pattern. Their fur grows in eight colors. A hairless cat may come in black, brown, cinnamon, cream, fawn, grey, red, and white. When you color a cat’s picture such as a sphinx breed, remember that coloring the fur won’t require strokes of any length. The fur will appear to be barely there. You might blend together two or three shades of the same color, but not of various colors, since calico hairless cats are almost unheard of. Finally, if you color a picture of a well known cartoon cat, remember to color it using the same color scheme as the original artist.
