Surfing Coloring Pages bring one of the most visually dramatic sports on earth to your coloring table – and this collection of 30+ free pages at ColoringPagesOnly.com captures the sport at its full range: Olympic athletes from Paris 2024 riding the legendary barrels of Teahupo’o in Tahiti, children and recreational surfers at beach breaks, a surfboard design page, and a cheerful supporting cast that includes Pikachu, SpongeBob and Sandy, Barbie, Dino, surfing crabs, and even a surfing sushi roll. Whether you’re drawn here by the Paris 2024 Games, by a child who loves the ocean, or by the specific visual challenge of rendering moving water and athletic form in color, this collection has more range than most sports collections on the site. The full sports universe is available through our Sports Coloring Pages hub.
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Surfing at the Paris 2024 Olympics
Surfing made its Olympic debut at Tokyo 2020 (held in 2021) and returned for its second Olympic appearance at the Paris 2024 Games – though “Paris” in the strictest geographic sense is somewhat generous, since the surfing competition was held at Teahupo’o in Tahiti, French Polynesia, roughly 15,000 kilometers from the French capital. Teahupo’o is one of the most respected and feared surf breaks in the world, known for its extraordinarily heavy, thick, hollow waves that break directly over a shallow reef in water that can be as shallow as one meter at the impact zone. The waves at Teahupo’o are not tall – they are dense and powerful in a way that makes them both visually spectacular and genuinely dangerous, and the decision to hold Olympic surfing there was widely praised by the surfing community as a commitment to showcasing the sport at its most demanding level.
The Paris 2024 surfing competition ran from July 27 to July 31, 2024, with 48 athletes competing – 24 men and 24 women – in a format where surfers take turns riding waves in 30-minute heats, with judges scoring each ride on a scale of 0 to 10 based on commitment, degree of difficulty, innovative and progressive maneuvers, combination of major maneuvers, speed and power, and flow.
The most memorable single moment of the competition – and one of the most iconic sports photographs of the year – was a wave ridden by Gabriel Medina of Brazil, a three-time world surfing champion, in which the photo captured him apparently floating several feet above his board in a moment of pure athletic exuberance. The image went viral globally and became one of the most shared sports photographs in recent memory. Medina did not ultimately win gold at Paris 2024, but the photograph became the defining image of the event.
Kauli Vaast of France won the men’s gold medal – a result that was both a sporting upset (Vaast was not the pre-tournament favorite) and a moment of particular significance for the French crowd watching one of their own win on a wave in French Polynesia. Jack Robinson of Australia won silver. Caroline Marks of the United States won the women’s gold medal. Tatiana Weston-Webb of Brazil won the women’s silver.
What’s Inside the Surfing Coloring Collection
The Paris 2024 Olympic athlete pages – Gabriel Medina in surfing Olympic 2024, Kauli Vaast in surfing Olympic 2024, Jack Robinson in surfing Olympic 2024, Johanne Defay in surfing Olympic 2024, Tatiana Weston-Webb in surfing Olympic 2024, Brisa Hennessy in surfing Olympic 2024, Caroline Marks in surfing Olympic 2024, Alonso Correa in surfing Olympic 2024 – form the most historically specific cluster in the collection, showing the real athletes who competed at Teahupo’o. Each page depicts a specific surfer in action on the wave, capturing the athletic posture and competitive intensity of Olympic-level performance. The Gabriel Medina page in particular is worth coloring with particular attention to the wave’s visual drama.
The general surfing pages – Professional Surfing, Man Surfing, Kid Surfing, Boy Surfing on the Beach, Cool Boy Surfing, Surfing Water Sports, Girl Surfing, Girl Surf, Boy Surfing, Boy Surf, Surfer – cover recreational and competitive surfing in the non-Olympic context, showing surfers of different ages and genders in a range of wave and beach settings. These are the most accessible pages in the collection for children who surf or want to, and the most flexible in terms of coloring choices because they don’t require accuracy to a specific athlete’s appearance.
The surfboard page – Surf Board – is the most design-oriented page in the collection, showing the board itself rather than a surfer riding it. Surfboards are one of the most creatively designed objects in sports equipment – they come in an almost unlimited range of colors, graphics, and pattern styles – and this page is an open invitation to design a board in any color scheme you choose.
The character crossover pages – Surfing Mario, Pikachu Surfing, Sandy and SpongeBob Surfing, Barbie Surfing, Surfing Barbie Color Page, Dino Surfing, Coloring Page of Crabs Are Surfing, Sushi Surfing – are the most playful pages in the collection. Pikachu Surfing puts the electric mouse on a wave in a move that is simultaneously canonical (Pikachu in Pokémon games and anime has a canon surfing move) and completely ridiculous in the best way. Sandy and SpongeBob Surfing captures the specific absurdity of underwater creatures surfing. Sushi Surfing is the most abstract – a piece of sushi as a surfer is exactly the kind of delightful conceptual leap that makes food/sport crossover illustration such a reliable source of charm. The Dino Surfing and Crabs Surfing pages carry the same logic: unexpected surfer, expected wave, unexpected combination.
The novelty page – Santa Claus Surfing – places Father Christmas on a surfboard, which is the exact kind of seasonal/sport crossover that exists for no reason except that it is funny and genuinely charming, and which works at any time of year precisely because a surfing Santa is inherently absurd in the most pleasant way possible.
The Surfing Puzzle page provides a grid-format puzzle composition rather than a straightforward illustration, requiring a slightly different approach to coloring than the action pages.
Coloring Tips for Surfing Pages
The ocean wave is the most technically challenging element in any surfing page and the one that most rewards understanding before you start. A surfing wave has three visually distinct zones that each call for different coloring treatment.
The face of the wave – the vertical wall of water a surfer rides along – is the deepest, most saturated blue-green in the composition. Real ocean water is not a single color: it is the particular translucent blue-green of deep water made luminous by light passing through it. A good starting point is a medium teal-blue – not too green, not too blue – applied most deeply in the center of the wave face where the water is thickest, lightening gradually as the water thins toward the curling crest.
The crest and curl of the wave – the lip that is breaking overhead in a barrel, or the white spray at the top of a less extreme break – contains the most white and the most dramatic light-to-dark transition in the whole scene. The water at the very top of the curl catches the most direct light before it breaks, so the upper edge should be very bright: either left as white paper or colored in the lightest possible blue-white. As the curl falls into the breaking foam, it becomes a vivid white-blue mixture – all the air trapped in the breaking wave. Rendering this transition from the deep teal of the face through the light teal of the thinning water into the bright white of the breaking crest is the single most effective coloring technique for making any wave page feel alive rather than static.
The whitewater and foam – the broken, turbulent water behind and below where the wave has already broken – should be rendered in pure white, or white with the lightest possible gray shadow areas to suggest depth and texture. Whitewater has no color of its own; it is water so thoroughly aerated with bubbles that it reflects light in all directions and reads as white. Keeping it genuinely white and bright prevents the composition from becoming muddy.
Sky color in surfing pages significantly affects the emotional register of the finished piece. A deep, saturated blue sky produces a competition-day, high-energy reading. A warmer, slightly hazy blue-white sky suggests early morning or late afternoon, softer and more meditative. The Teahupo’o Olympics pages are best served by a vivid, deep Pacific sky – the light in Tahiti in late July is intense and direct.
For wetsuits – which most serious surfers and all the Olympic athletes would be wearing – the canonical look is black, but competition wetsuits often have colored panels, sponsor logos, and contrasting sections. For the Olympic athlete pages, rendering the wetsuit primarily in black with colored side panels and whatever flag-color accents correspond to each athlete’s nationality (green and gold for Jack Robinson’s Australia, red, white, and blue for the French and American athletes, blue and yellow for Brazil’s Gabriel Medina) creates the most accurate-feeling results.
For surfboards, the range of legitimate choices is genuinely unlimited – professional surfers ride boards in every imaginable color and graphic style. However, some board colors create better visual contrast against the wave: boards in white, yellow, or vivid tropical colors read most clearly against the blue-green of ocean water, while dark boards can get lost in the shadow areas of the wave face.
For the character crossover pages – Pikachu Surfing, SpongeBob and Sandy, Barbie, Dino Surfing – keep the canonical character palettes intact (Pikachu’s yellow, SpongeBob’s yellow-brown, Sandy’s brown spacesuit, Barbie’s pink) and use the wave as the backdrop for full oceanic color expression. The contrast between a flat-colored character and a fully realized wave background creates exactly the visual balance that makes these pages work.
5 Activities to Do With Your Surfing Pages
Color the Paris 2024 athlete portfolio. Print all eight Olympic athlete pages – Gabriel Medina, Kauli Vaast, Jack Robinson, Johanne Defay, Tatiana Weston-Webb, Brisa Hennessy, Caroline Marks, and Alonso Correa – and color each surfer with nationality-specific details: the colors of their wetsuit panels and surfboard corresponding to their country’s flag colors where possible. Research each athlete’s country and flag before you start, and write each athlete’s name, country, and their Paris 2024 result below their finished page. Arranged together, this creates a mini portrait gallery of one of the most memorable surfing competitions in history, made personal by your own coloring work.
Create a wave study series. Print five pages from the general surfing collection – choosing pages that show the wave from different angles or in different states of breaking – and color all five using the same ocean palette but with deliberate variations in how you render the wave’s three zones (face, crest, whitewater). In one page, make the whitewater very minimal and the face very deep and saturated. In another, make the crest very dramatic and bright. In another, render the sky in sunset colors that change the whole mood. This five-page series is a genuine color study in how the same subject changes entirely based on decisions about light and saturation.
Design a signature surfboard. Print the Surf Board page and treat it entirely as a graphic design exercise rather than a realistic coloring task – design a surfboard with your own color scheme, your own pattern, and any decorative elements you want to add: stripes, geometric shapes, a pattern inspired by traditional Hawaiian or Polynesian textile design, abstract waves, your own name in hand-lettered style. Professional surfers and board shapers spend significant creative energy on board graphics, and this page is the same creative exercise with a pencil or marker instead of spray paint.
Color the character crossover set as a comic strip. Print Surfing Mario, Pikachu Surfing, Sandy and SpongeBob Surfing, Dino Surfing, and Sushi Surfing, and color all five with their canonical character palettes plus vivid, matching ocean backgrounds for each. Arrange them in a horizontal strip and add a one-line caption below each – what would each character say about surfing? What would Pikachu yell? What problem would SpongeBob be having? What is the sushi thinking? This activity combines coloring with creative writing and character voice in a format that children who enjoy comics will find naturally engaging.
Make a before-and-after board design. Print two copies of the Surf Board page. Color the first in an existing professional surfer’s board colors and logo style – research a board design from one of the Paris 2024 athletes as your reference. Color the second as your own redesign of the same board, using the same shape but completely different colors, patterns, and aesthetics. Mount both side by side with the athlete’s name below the first and your own design name below the second. This exercise in design-by-reference – starting with an existing design and asking what you would change – is one of the most useful creative activities for developing aesthetic judgment alongside technical coloring skill.
Download Your Free Surfing Pages Today!
All 30+ Surfing Coloring Pages are completely free – download as PDF to print or color online with one click. No sign-up, no cost. Whether you’re coloring the Gabriel Medina page because you saw that photograph in 2024 and never forgot it, or you’re printing the SpongeBob and Sandy page for a child who loves both the ocean and cartoons – we hope this collection delivers exactly what you need.
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