The colouring pages print without any fiddling: open the PDF, press print, accept the defaults. This page is for the cases where that is not enough — the bottom of the sheet comes out cut off, the lines print grey, the paper curls under a marker, or two children want a sheet each from one page.
The two downloads this guide is about: all twenty characters and the horror set, both A4 and both designed to survive a badly behaved printer.
Paper: what to use and what to avoid
Ordinary 80 gsm copier paper is fine for pencils and crayons. It is also what most people have, so start there and only change if something goes wrong.
- Pencils and crayons: 80 gsm is enough. The one thing that ruins a pencil sheet is a printer that leaves roller marks, so check the first page before printing twenty.
- Fine-liners and felt tips: use 100–120 gsm. Thin paper lets marker bleed through, and a child pressing hard will go through 80 gsm at the eyes.
- Watercolour or brush pens: 160 gsm or heavier, or print on plain paper and accept that it will cockle. The lines are waterproof when printed, so the colour is the only problem.
- What not to use: photo paper. It is glossy, it costs more than the rest of the exercise, and pencils skip across it.
Ink settings
These are line drawings, so the printer has very little to do. Three settings are worth knowing about.
- Black and white, or greyscale. Turn it on. The sheets have no colour, so printing in colour mode only wastes the colour cartridge and, on some inkjets, lays down a composite black that smudges.
- Normal or high quality, not draft. Draft mode thins the lines and, on a tired print head, drops sections of them. The lines are the entire product; this is the one place to spend a little ink.
- Do not let the printer “enhance” the document. Photo-enhancement modes add contrast and turn a clean line drawing into a smudgy one.
A4, US Letter, and the cut-off bottom
Both PDFs are A4 (210 × 297 mm). US Letter is 216 × 279 mm: wider and shorter. Printed at 100% on Letter paper, the bottom 18 mm of the A4 page falls outside the sheet.
The sheets have a 14 mm margin and a footer that sits inside it, so in practice nothing important is lost — but the footer is the first thing to go, and a sheet printed at 100% on Letter will have a slightly uneven bottom margin. The fix is to print at 100% and trim, or to choose “fit to page” and accept that the drawing is about 6% smaller.
- If your printer has a “fit to printable area” option: use it on Letter, skip it on A4. It respects the printer's unprintable margin instead of scaling blindly.
- If the bottom is still cut off: your printer's minimum margin is probably larger than the sheet's. Print at 95% instead of fit-to-page — it looks better than the automatic setting, which often scales to 90% or lower.
- If the top is cut off: check the paper size setting. A printer set to Letter while A4 paper is loaded will shift the image up.
Two sheets on one page
For younger children, a full A4 character is often bigger than they need, and the lines are spread out enough that the colouring takes a long time. Printing two pages per sheet halves the paper and makes the drawing a size that fits comfortably in front of a four-year-old.
In the print dialog, look for “pages per sheet”, “multiple pages per sheet”, or “layout”. Set it to 2 and choose portrait, not landscape: the sheets are tall, and a 2-up landscape layout makes them smaller than they need to be. The same setting prints four to a page for party-sized sheets, which is about the point where the line detail stops surviving.
Printing for a group
A classroom, a birthday party or a waiting room changes the arithmetic. Print the normal set rather than the horror one unless every parent involved knows the horror forms, hand out pencils rather than markers, and print the character each child asks for instead of the whole file.
The PDF has a cover page and twenty sheets, so “pages 2 to 21” is the range you want; printing “all” wastes the cover once per copy. Most print dialogs accept a page range, and the character order matches the characters list, so page 2 is Black and page 21 is Wenda.
What it costs
A line drawing in greyscale is the cheapest page a home printer can produce — no colour, no large areas of ink, no photo dithering. On an inkjet, a sheet typically costs a few cents in ink and paper; on a laser printer it is close to the price of the paper alone. Twenty sheets is not a cartridge-killing exercise, and the draft-quality setting is the only place where saving a little ink actually costs you the page.
When something goes wrong
- Lines print grey and thin. The print head is partly clogged. Run the printer's cleaning cycle once, then print a single test sheet before reprinting the rest.
- Black smudges down the page. Toner or ink on the roller. Print two blank pages to clear it, then try again.
- The image is offset or cut on one side. Paper size setting does not match the loaded paper — the most common cause of a cropped sheet.
- Marker bleeds through to the sheet underneath. Put a sheet of scrap paper under the one being coloured. This is the cheapest fix in the whole guide and the one most people skip.
- The child wants a bigger drawing. Print at A3 with “scale to fit” and the lines stay sharp, because the PDF is vector-based line art rather than a photo.
Afterwards
Coloured sheets go on the fridge, and the good ones belong on the fan works wall, which takes a photo and a name and publishes it with credit.
The rule for the files themselves does not change with printing: for personal, non-commercial use; not for sale, not for mass production. A photocopied stack for a classroom is fine. A photocopied stack for sale is not, and neither is a colouring book built from these sheets — that needs a written licence from ShinStar LLC. The fan content policy covers what is and is not allowed, and hi@sprunki.com is where to ask.
Where to go next
- SPRUNKI colouring pages — the normal set, all twenty characters.
- Horror mode colouring pages — the same twenty, in their horror forms.
- Crochet your own character — if the colouring goes well and the child wants the plush version.
- SPRUNKI with your kids — the game itself, for the adult in the room.
- More guides — the rest of the blog.