Tractor colouring page

A tractor with one huge lugged rear wheel and a small front one, pulling a two-wheeled trailer.

A tractor stands in side view facing left, pulling a small open trailer behind it. The rear wheel is very large and its tyre is drawn with deep lugs around the outside, like a row of blocks; inside it are two concentric rings and a hub. The front wheel is much smaller and lugged the same way. Between them sits the body: a bonnet with a small headlamp at the front, a cab with a single empty window under a flat roof, a curved mudguard over the rear wheel, and an exhaust pipe standing up beside the cab with a bend at the top. The trailer behind is a plain box on one pair of wheels.

The two wheels are the first thing anybody notices about a tractor and the drawing leans on that: the rear wheel alone takes up more of the page than the cab does. Each wheel gives you four separate areas — the lugged tyre band, the outer ring, the inner ring, and the hub at the centre — so a wheel can carry four tones without a single line being crossed.

The lugs are the fine work. They are a ring of small blocks around the outside of each tyre, and there are a lot of them. Filling every lug is slow; colouring the tyre band as one dark shape and leaving the lugs white is quick and reads as tread from a distance. Doing the big wheel one way and the small wheel the other is the one thing worth avoiding, since the eye compares them immediately.

The body is a set of broad flat panels — bonnet, cab side, mudguard — and it is where the tractor's colour lives. Because they are separated by strong outlines they take one colour at three pressures very well: lightest on the bonnet facing you, deeper on the cab, deepest under the mudguard curve. That is enough to make a flat side view look like a machine with a shape.

The cab window is empty and is worth leaving white. It is the only opening in the machine and the only place the paper can show through, which is what stops the tractor reading as a solid block. The exhaust pipe beside it is a narrow lane with a bend, and a dark colour there separates it from the cab behind it.

The trailer is the quietest object on the sheet and that is useful. It is a plain box with a rim along the top and one pair of wheels, so it can take a second colour that appears nowhere on the tractor, and doing that makes it read as a separate thing being towed rather than as part of the machine. Left white, it also works: an empty trailer behind a coloured tractor is a real-looking arrangement.

One plain point sits in the wheel sizes. A tractor's rear wheels are large and its front wheels are small because the rear ones carry the driven load and need the grip, while the fronts mostly steer; the deep lugs on the tyre are angled so that they bite into soft ground and clear themselves of mud as the wheel turns. That is why the drawing gives both wheels the same tread pattern at two completely different sizes.

Print at actual size on plain A4 paper so the lugs and the concentric rings inside the wheels stay separate. If markers are the plan, use them on the body panels and switch to a pencil for the wheels, or the lugs will vanish under one stroke. Cut out along the outline and the tractor comes away towing the trailer; cutting between them gives two shapes that can be stood side by side or spaced apart.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026626 words