You’re probably familiar with this from your own experience: your inventors provide beautiful colourful figures – and you must convert everything into black and white drawings for the patent application. For European patent applications, this has been a thing of the past since the 1^st of October 2025 – at least for electronically filed applications. If you wish to file your application in paper form, however, black and white drawings are still required.

Colour drawings can also be used for EP divisional applications filed on or after the 1^st of October 2025, although care must be taken to ensure that no new facts are introduced, meaning that the disclosure of the divisional application – and thus also of the drawings – does not go beyond the content of the earlier application.

The term “colour drawing” also includes drawings in grayscale. Furthermore, combinations of colour and black and white drawings are also possible in a single application.

Despite this good news, especially regarding representations of layer structures and their manufacturing processes, some boundary conditions must be observed:

• Colour drawings are not permitted for international (PCT) applications. While they can be submitted in colour, the WIPO will convert them to black and white. It is advisable to use the preview function to check that all features are still clearly recognizable in black and white.
• When entering the European phase from an international application, the EPO will only use colour drawings if, firstly, they were submitted as such to the WIPO and are available in PATENTSCOPE, and, secondly, if this was indicated in the international publication. Therefore, the international publication should be carefully reviewed, and a correction should be initiated if necessary.
• Corrected or subsequently submitted drawings must always be submitted according to the original colour combination; for example, originally black and white drawings must be submitted in black and white. The same applies to translations.
• Since colour designations such as “beige” or “yellow” are often not unambiguously identifiable, features of the drawings should, if possible, not be assigned to them by reference to their colour in the description, claims, or abstract.

Furthermore, the use of colour is permitted only for the drawings themselves; coloured elements are still not permitted in the description, claims, or abstract. These will be converted to black and white by the EPO before publication, while coloured drawings will be published in colour.