Haunted House With Bats Flying And Full Moon Coloring Page

A tall narrow house leans slightly, with broken shutters, a sagging porch, a tower at one side and light in two upstairs windows. Bats scatter across the sky in front of a full moon, and a dead tree frames the left edge. The detailed treatment gives the roof individual shingles and the walls individual boards, so surface texture is where most of your time will go.

Weathered wood is the interesting challenge and it is not brown. Gray with a hint of purple, laid unevenly so some boards come out darker than their neighbors, looks far more convincing than a flat wood color. The two lit windows should be the only warm thing anywhere in the picture, a strong yellow orange, and their glow is what carries the whole page.

The look of the classic American haunted house comes from real Second Empire architecture of the 1860s and 1870s. Those houses fell out of fashion fast, sat empty and decaying by the 1920s, and cartoonists simply drew what an abandoned one looked like.