Police car coloring page

A patrol car in side view with a roof light bar, two antennas and completely plain door panels.

A patrol car stands in side view facing left, drawn wide across the page. On the roof sits a light bar divided into segments, with a thin antenna standing up on either side of it. The body is a plain sedan shape: a hood, a windshield, two side windows divided by a pillar, a rear window, a trunk, and two doors with a line between them. There is a side mirror on the front door, a grille and a headlamp at the front, and two large wheels with treaded tires and concentric hubs. The door panels are completely empty — there is no crest, no number and no lettering on any surface.

That emptiness is the point of the sheet. The two door panels are the largest blank areas on the page, and on a real patrol car they are exactly where the markings go, which means this drawing is asking you to invent them. A single band along the doors, a two-tone split with the roof one color and the body another, or blocks of alternating color along the sides are all things the outline will take without argument.

The light bar is the smallest and most rewarding shape here. It is divided into segments, so each one can be a different color, and because it sits alone on the roof against white paper it is the most visible thing on the sheet at a glance. Alternating two strong colors along it is the fastest way to make a plain car read as a patrol car, and it costs about fifteen seconds.

The windows are the one place worth leaving white. Four glass shapes filled in a color make the car look solid; left as paper, they read as glass and give the drawing somewhere to breathe. If they are colored, a very pale blue with the paper still showing is the version that still reads as a window rather than as a panel.

The wheels are drawn with tread marks around the outside and two concentric rings inside, which gives three separate areas per wheel: the tire, the outer hub ring, and the center. Treating those three the same way on both wheels keeps the car level; treating them differently makes it look like two wheels from different vehicles. The tread marks themselves are small and can be left white against a dark tire.

There is no scheme this sheet requires. Patrol cars are painted differently in different places, so a black-and-white car, a blue-and-white one, or a car in colors nobody has ever used are all equally consistent with the drawing. The one thing that carries the identification is the light bar on the roof, so as long as that is doing something the rest can be anything.

A small drawing observation is worth making. The two thin lines standing up beside the light bar are antennas, and they are drawn as bare strokes rather than as closed shapes, which means they cannot be filled — they can only be drawn over or left alone. Leaving them is usually better: a colored line the same width as the outline just makes them look thicker, and their thinness is what makes them read as antennas.

Print at actual size on plain letter paper. The antennas and the tire tread are the first things a smaller print thickens or loses. If markers are the plan, load heavier card stock, since the body is one broad panel and a solid car uses a lot of ink. Cut around the outline and the car comes away with the light bar and both antennas attached; cutting below the antennas instead gives a sturdier shape that stands up when it is glued to a folded strip.

Published August 29, 2026Updated August 29, 2026623 words