Printable Motorcycle and Bike Coloring Pages for Kids

The word chopper comes from chopping, since 1950s and 1960s builders in Southern California literally cut unwanted parts off factory motorcycles to make them lighter and faster. Fenders got trimmed down or removed entirely, extra bodywork disappeared, and heavy stock parts were swapped for the lightest pieces a builder could find, leaving only the frame, engine, wheels, and just enough else to ride.

That chopping process is exactly why a chopper looks so bare compared to a cruiser or touring bike, since every part left on the frame earned its place by being essential rather than decorative.

Builders angled the front forks out much further than a factory motorcycle ever shipped, a modification called raking, stretching the front wheel dramatically ahead of the rest of the bike.

Cruiser motorcycles trace their look back to the big V-twin machines American factories built in the 1930s and 1940s, when riders wanted a low, comfortable seat more than outright speed. Wide handlebars swept back toward the rider, footpegs sat forward of the seat instead of underneath it, and the whole machine sat low to the ground, a riding position built for cruising city streets and open roads rather than racing.

That relaxed layout stuck around for decades because it let a rider sit upright and comfortable for hours, exactly the posture drawn on this page as the rider leans back with feet stretched forward.

Off-road motorcycle racing traces back to 1920s England, where riders called their muddy cross-country races scrambles, chasing each other over hills, ditches, and open fields on machines barely modified from street bikes. The French later renamed the sport motocross, blending the word motorcycle with cross-country, and the name stuck worldwide as the sport spread across Europe and into the United States.

Early scramble bikes still carried heavy road-going frames and skinny tires, nothing like the purpose-built machines racers ride today, so much of motocross history is really a story about engineers stripping weight and adding suspension travel year after year.

William Harley and the Davidson brothers started building motorized bicycles in a Milwaukee backyard shed in 1903, and within a decade their small shop had grown into one of the largest motorcycle makers in the country. Early touring-style machines stayed close to their bicycle roots, with narrow frames and thin tires, but factories kept stretching wheelbases and adding bigger fuel tanks as riders wanted to travel farther between fill-ups.

By the 1930s, dealers were selling dedicated long-distance models built for cross-country trips rather than quick errands around town, setting the stage for the full dresser-style bikes that followed decades later.

Early scrambles racers in 1920s England rode over hills and ditches without ever meaning to leave the ground, since their machines were barely modified street bikes with no suspension travel to spare. Jumping only became a real part of the sport once tracks started including deliberate mounds and dips, and riders realized a bike with enough suspension could clear a gap faster than one that rolled through it.

By the time the sport crossed the Atlantic and picked up the name motocross, American promoters were already shaping tracks with jumps built specifically to test a rider's nerve and a bike's suspension.

Gottlieb Daimler built the Petroleum Reitwagen in 1885, widely credited as the first true motorcycle, mounting a small combustion engine onto a wooden bicycle-style frame with iron-banded wheels. It only reached about 7 miles per hour, but it proved an engine could power a two-wheeled vehicle balanced by the rider alone.

Within twenty years, dozens of small factories across Europe and the United States were bolting engines onto bicycle frames of their own. Most of those early machines rattled apart within a few hundred miles, since nobody yet understood how much vibration a two-wheeled frame could take.

The engine sitting between the wheels on this coloring page is shaped like the letter V, a layout called a V-twin where two cylinders lean toward each other at an angle instead of standing side by side.

Three-wheeled motorcycles are not a new idea at all. Small delivery trikes with a cargo box over two rear wheels rolled through city streets in the early 1900s, carrying bread, milk, and mail long before anyone rode a trike purely for fun. Those early machines used a single front wheel for steering and a wide, stable rear axle that could carry far more weight than a two-wheeled motorcycle without tipping over.

Postal services and small businesses in Europe and the United States kept using three-wheeled delivery machines well into the mid-1900s, prizing the extra cargo space and the fact that a trike could sit upright at a stop without a rider putting a foot down.

Honda's CB750, released in 1969, is widely credited with kicking off the modern sport bike category by pairing a powerful four-cylinder engine with a front disc brake, a combination almost unheard of on a production motorcycle at the time. Motorcycle magazines coined the term superbike to describe machines fast enough to embarrass much larger sports cars off the line.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, Japanese manufacturers kept pushing top speed and handling further, racing each other to build the quickest production bike a rider could buy off a dealer floor.

The angular full-body fairing drawn on this page traces straight back to endurance and Grand Prix racing, where engineers shaped bodywork in wind tunnels to cut drag and keep the engine cool at sustained high speed.

The sidecar was patented in England in 1903, just a few years after the first practical motorcycles appeared, giving riders a way to carry a passenger or cargo without building a whole separate vehicle. Early sidecars were little more than a wicker or wood chair bolted to a simple frame connected to the motorcycle, a far cry from the rounded bullet-shaped bodies that became standard by the 1930s.

That third wheel also solved the balance problem a passenger created, since a motorcycle carrying extra weight only on one side would otherwise lean and struggle to stay upright at low speed.

Early 1800s bicycles had no pedals at all and were pushed along by walking, earning nicknames like the running machine, until pedals attached directly to the front wheel appeared in the 1860s on bikes riders called bone-shakers because of their stiff iron-tired ride. The safety bicycle of the 1880s introduced a chain-driven rear wheel and two equal-sized wheels, giving the modern bicycle shape still used today.

That 1880s redesign got its name for a reason: earlier bikes with a giant front wheel and a tiny back wheel, known as penny-farthings, perched the rider so high above the ground that a hard stop could send them tumbling headfirst.

Piaggio, an Italian company that had built aircraft parts during World War II, designed its first scooter in 1946 out of leftover factory tooling meant for cheap, simple transportation in a country with bombed-out roads and little spare cash. The engineer behind the design reportedly said the finished shape looked like a wasp, and the Italian word for wasp, vespa, became the scooter's lasting name.

That first scooter sold for a fraction of the price of a car, putting personal transportation within reach of ordinary families rebuilding their lives after the war.

Unlike a motorcycle frame with an engine bolted on top, a classic scooter uses a single steel monocoque shell that forms the floorboard, leg shield, and body panels all in one welded piece, the smooth integrated panel drawn on this coloring page.