Pumpkin Coloring Pages

A pumpkin is the easiest subject in the fall calendar to color and one of the hardest to color well. The outline is a single round shape, so a three year old can stay inside it, but the ribbed body curves in two directions at once, which is what gives an adult sheet an hour of real work. These 15 pumpkin coloring pages cover both ends of that range: carved jack-o-lantern faces drawn in thick toddler lines, whole pumpkins on the vine and in the patch, and decorated designs for older kids and adults. Every one downloads as a free printable PDF sized for US Letter paper.

Simple Jack-o-lantern is the sheet most people came here for, with triangle eyes, a triangle nose and a wide grin of square teeth. Cute Pumpkin With A Happy Face suits the youngest hands, and Smiling Jack-o-lantern With Round Eyes keeps Halloween friendly for a child who does not want the scary version. Spooky Jack-o-lantern With Angry Eyes and Jack-o-lantern Wearing A Witch Hat go the other way for older children.

Leave the carved shapes empty

The best trick on any jack-o-lantern sheet takes no skill at all. The light in a real lantern sits inside the pumpkin, so the cut eyes, nose and mouth are the brightest part of the picture, not the darkest. Color the body and leave every carved shape as bare paper. Ring each one with a thin band of pale yellow if you want to push it further. Filling the face in black is the single most common way a finished pumpkin ends up looking flat, and it happens because printed illustrations almost always show those shapes solid. None of the sheets here arrive that way. Every carved eye and grin is drawn as an open outline waiting on a decision.

The ribs are the other lever. Each one marks a seam where the surface turns away from the viewer, so a slightly deeper tone pressed into the seams and a lighter touch through the middle of each band makes a flat circle look round. That one habit separates a sheet that reads as a ball from one that reads as a pumpkin.

Pumpkins are not only orange

Growers sell white, pale green, deep blue-gray, dark red and striped varieties alongside the familiar orange, which makes Pumpkins In A Pumpkin Patch and Wheelbarrow Full Of Pumpkins more interesting than they look. Both sheets hold pumpkins of several sizes, so a child can give each one a different color and still be accurate. Pumpkin Growing On The Vine and Plain Pumpkin With A Curly Vine add the leaves and coiled tendrils that shoppers rarely see, which makes them useful next to a lesson about how food grows.

Older colorists and adults should start at Decorated Pumpkin With Patterned Panels, where the ribs split the pumpkin into panels packed with open circles, teardrops and spirals. Round Pumpkin Mandala and Pumpkin And Autumn Leaf Wreath both build a circle out of small repeated shapes, and the wreath cuts out neatly enough to hang on a door.

Print a few of these alongside the rest of the season. Our Halloween coloring pages carry the same lanterns into full night scenes, fall coloring pages cover leaves, acorns and harvest scenes, and Thanksgiving coloring pages pick the story up at the table a month later.