Pumpkin Coloring Pages

October is the one month of the year when a child will happily colour the same vegetable twenty times over, and most free pumpkin coloring pages waste that. You get one carved lantern, scanned from a scan, with broken lines and a face so small that the wax runs straight over the edge of it. Print it twice and the second copy is already boring.

So these 34 sheets are drawn as a set rather than as one lantern at four sizes. There are carved faces for the last week of October and plain uncarved pumpkins that stay in season from September right through the harvest, a patch with a barn behind it for the child who wants a whole scene, and a mandala for the child who wants to sit still for an hour. They fall into six groups, and the groups exist because a toddler with a fat crayon and a nine year old with fineliners want completely different paper.

Carved faces, from friendly to frightening

The classic comes first, two triangle eyes and a square toothed grin. Then a round happy lantern with its eyebrows raised, a spooky one with slanted eyes and a jagged mouth, a silly one winking with its tongue out, one carved into the face of a cat with ears and whisker slits, and three of them lined up along a fence rail under a moon.

Out at the pumpkin patch

The patch sheet is the big one, a field of pumpkins lying among curling vine leaves with a barn and a fence behind them. Beside it there is a wooden wheelbarrow piled high, three porch steps with a pumpkin standing on each, a straw scarecrow with corn stalks at his back, a farm wagon loaded with pumpkins and hay bales, and one single pumpkin still attached to its vine with the tendrils curling off into the air.

The same pumpkin, drawn six ways

One plain outline with nothing inside it at all. A kawaii pumpkin with blushing cheeks and stubby little arms. A symmetrical pumpkin mandala. A zentangle where every rib carries a different fine repeating pattern. A realistic pumpkin with a woody grooved stalk and a veined leaf. And a doodle pumpkin whose ribs are filled with dots, stripes, zigzags, stars, hearts and checks.

Pumpkins and the animals that sit next to them

For the child who would rather colour a creature than a vegetable. A fluffy cat with its tail curled round its paws, a round owl gripping the stalk, a squirrel holding an acorn in both hands, a hedgehog wading through a drift of leaves, two pumpkins in front of three tall sunflowers, and one sitting in a drift of fallen leaves.

Thick lines and fine lines

The two ends of the collection. Three toddler sheets are drawn with very heavy outlines and no narrow gaps anywhere: a giant pumpkin that fills the page, three plain ones in a row, and a big smiling face with nothing else on the paper. At the other end a pumpkin carved into a cottage with shuttered windows and a stone path, and a fairy tale pumpkin carriage with spoked wheels and scrollwork down its sides.

More than one pumpkin on the page

Sometimes the interesting part is how many there are. There is a wreath of pumpkins, leaves and acorns with an empty middle, a page tiled with small pumpkins and no two of them the same shape, a wobbling tower of five stacked biggest to smallest, a bunting garland strung across the page, and a row of four lanterns on Halloween night with bats crossing a full moon.

What age are these pumpkin coloring pages for?

The collection runs from three to ten. The three toddler sheets use very thick lines and no narrow gaps, which is what a three year old can actually stay inside. The carved lanterns and the patch scenes suit five to eight, and the mandala, the zentangle and the pumpkin house will hold an older child for a whole afternoon.