Nimona Coloring Pages at ColoringPagesOnly.com brings together 17 free pages based on the 2023 Netflix animated film – Nimona in her human form across a range of poses and expressions, Nimona mid-transformation as she shapeshifts into various creatures, the Golden Guard in his armor, and Nimona alongside Ballister Boldheart. Download any page as a PDF to print, or color online in your browser. The full Cartoons collection is at Cartoons Coloring Pages.
What is Nimona?
Nimona is a 2023 Netflix animated film directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane, produced by Annapurna Pictures and DNEG Animation. It is based on the 2015 graphic novel of the same name by ND Stevenson, which began as a webcomic in 2012.
The film is set in a futuristic medieval kingdom – a world where knights in armor coexist with holographic technology, neon signage, and futuristic weapons. The story centers on Ballister Boldheart, a commoner who becomes the first non-noble knight in the kingdom’s history, only to be framed for the murder of the Queen on the day of his knighting. Branded a villain and hunted by the Institution – the kingdom’s governing body of knights – Ballister is approached by Nimona, a shapeshifting girl who offers to be his sidekick.
Nimona is chaotic, enthusiastic, and genuinely dangerous, but she is also something more complicated than a simple villain’s accomplice. The film’s central question: what makes someone a monster? – is asked through both Ballister’s false villainy and Nimona’s real nature. What the film does with that question, and what Nimona turns out to be, is the reason the film resonated so strongly with its audience.
Nimona received widespread critical acclaim and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. It became one of Netflix’s most-watched animated films and developed a particularly passionate fan community drawn to its themes of identity, belonging, and being defined by others’ fears.
Character Guide
Nimona is the film’s title character – a shapeshifting girl who appears to be in her early teens in her default human form. Her canonical appearance: short, choppy pink-red hair with an undercut, pale skin, and dark clothing – typically a dark grey or near-black hoodie, dark pants, and boots. Her eyes are a bright, slightly unsettling shade of green. She has a gap between her front teeth visible when she smiles, which is often. Her expression in her human form ranges between mischievous delight and fierce determination – she is rarely neutral or calm.
As a shapeshifter, Nimona’s transformations are one of the visual highlights of the film. She can become any creature – a small cat, a massive shark, a bird, a rhinoceros, a wolf – and the transitions between forms are shown as fluid, dynamic shifts rather than instant swaps. In the coloring pages, the transformation and shapeshifting pages show her mid-change, with multiple animal forms visible around or emerging from her body.
Ballister Boldheart is a large, broad-shouldered Black man in his late twenties or early thirties, with a prosthetic mechanical arm replacing his right arm below the elbow – the result of an injury inflicted by the Golden Guard during the film’s opening sequence. He wears dark knight armor without the Institution’s insignia after his exile. His expression throughout most of the film is weary and suspicious; he did not ask for a shapeshifting sidekick and is not sure what to do with her.
The Golden Guard (Ambrosius Goldenloin) is the film’s primary antagonist and Ballister’s former best friend and romantic partner. He is a tall, lean white man in his late twenties with light brown hair, and he wears full golden armor – the distinctive bright gold-yellow plate armor of the Institution’s elite knight. His face behind the mask has a more conflicted expression than his official role suggests; the film gradually reveals that the Golden Guard’s relationship with Ballister is far more complicated than the villain/hero binary he’s supposed to inhabit.
Coloring Tips
Nimona’s hair is her most visually distinctive feature and the first coloring decision on every page. The canonical color is a specific red-pink – not bubblegum pink, not scarlet red, but a warm magenta-red that sits between the two. It reads as clearly pink in cool contexts and clearly red in warm ones. This ambiguity is part of what makes it work as a character color. For the gradient that appears in some illustrations – the hair darker at the roots and lighter or pinker at the tips – try applying a slightly deeper, more saturated red-violet at the base and lightening toward the magenta-pink at the tips.
Nimona’s dark clothing is a near-black that is not quite pure black in the film – it tends toward a very dark charcoal grey or dark blue-grey, with slightly lighter values visible at fabric folds and edges. Pure black can make her clothing merge with the page’s outline strokes. Using a very dark grey or dark grey-blue instead keeps the clothing reading as dark while allowing the linework to stay visible.
The Golden Guard’s armor is the most specific color in the collection – the yellow-gold of the Institution’s elite knight armor. This is not the warm amber-gold of antique metal but a cleaner, more saturated bright gold – closer to the gold in a gold pen than to bronze or ochre. The armor is polished and reflective, meaning it benefits most from a three-value approach: the brightest gold in the direct light areas, a mid-value golden yellow in the main body areas, and a darker amber or warm brown in the deepest shadow areas (joints, undercuts, the interior of the visor). The contrast between the light-catching surfaces and the shadow areas is what makes armor look three-dimensional.
Ballister’s prosthetic arm is a dark metallic grey – the mechanical limb reads as slightly blue-grey metal, darker and colder in tone than Nimona’s clothing. The joints and functional elements of the prosthetic should be rendered in a slightly darker metallic to suggest depth and mechanical detail.
For the transformation and shapeshifting pages – Nimona Shapeshifting and Nimona Transforming – these are the most creatively open pages in the collection. The various animal forms surrounding or emerging from Nimona during transformation can each be colored in their realistic animal colors: grey for the shark, brown or orange for the cat or wolf, and so on. Alternatively, some fan artists render all of Nimona’s transformed forms in her personal color palette – pinks, reds, and dark greys – treating the animal shapes as expressions of her one identity rather than as distinct creatures. Both approaches produce valid and interesting results.
For Nimona with wings, the wing form Nimona takes is her most dramatic and visually powerful transformation. The wings in the film have a dark coloring consistent with Nimona’s overall palette – dark grey-black primary feathers fading slightly toward the interior of the wing. The spread of the wings as she crouches in attack stance gives this page the most dynamic energy of any composition in the collection, and the background is the right place to add atmosphere: a dark sky, storm clouds, or dramatic lighting that matches the intensity of the pose.
For the Nimona and Ballister pages, the warm-and-cool contrast between them is visually built into their designs. Nimona’s warm pink-red hair and her general warm palette contrast with Ballister’s darker, cooler armored form. Keeping this temperature contrast – warm for Nimona, cool for Ballister – makes their side-by-side pages read with the same visual dynamic that the film establishes between them.
5 Activities with Your Nimona Pages
Color Nimona across all her forms. Print Nimona Shapeshifting and Nimona Transforming alongside at least two solo Nimona pages in her human form. Color the solo pages first, establishing her canonical palette: the specific pink-red hair, the dark near-black clothing, the pale skin. Then color the transformation pages – and make a deliberate choice: will you color the animal forms in their realistic natural colors (grey shark, brown wolf, orange cat), or will you color every form in Nimona’s personal pink-red and dark-grey palette, treating all her transformations as expressions of the same self? There is no wrong answer, but committing to one approach across all the transformation pages and keeping it consistent is what makes the finished set feel intentional.
Color the Golden Guard in canonical versus alternate palettes. Print Golden Guard in Armor twice. Color the first copy in the film’s canonical gold armor – bright gold, amber shadow, warm highlight. Color the second copy in a completely different armor color of your choice: deep crimson, midnight blue, forest green, or silver. The armor form stays identical; only the color changes. Compare the two finished pages and notice how dramatically the color changes the character’s emotional register – gold reads as official authority and power; the alternate color will carry entirely different connotations depending on what you choose.
Color Nimona and the Golden Guard as a paired contrast study. Print Nimona Leaning Pose (or whichever solo Nimona page you prefer) and Golden Guard in Armor. Color both pages and then display them side by side. The color contrast between them – Nimona’s warm, chaotic pink-red-dark palette and the Golden Guard’s formal, brilliant gold armor – visually expresses the same tension that the film builds between them narratively: the shapeshifter who defies categorization against the institution’s most decorated enforcer.
Build the transformation sequence as a comic strip. Print Nimona Shapeshifting, Nimona Transforming, and Nimona with Wings Spread. Color all three pages in a consistent palette. Then write a three-panel caption sequence beneath them – one sentence per page – telling the story of a transformation: why Nimona is changing, what she is becoming, and what happens next. You are writing the moment before and after the coloring page’s frozen instant. This exercise connects the static coloring page to the dynamic, motion-based nature of shapeshifting that makes Nimona’s character design so unusual.
Color the Nimona and Ballister friendship page as a mood study. Print Nimona and Ballister twice. Color the first copy using warm, close tones – keeping both characters in their canonical colors but adding warm amber light as if from a fire or lamplight, suggesting the late-film moments when their friendship has solidified. Color the second copy using cooler, more distant tones – keeping the canonical colors but shifting the atmosphere toward the cooler light of earlier in the film, when Ballister views Nimona with wariness, and she hasn’t fully revealed herself. The two finished versions of the same page, colored in different atmospheric light temperatures, should tell two different moments from the same relationship.
