Fall Coloring Pages

What makes a page feel like autumn? Usually a leaf, a pumpkin and an animal getting ready for winter, and these fall coloring pages have plenty of all three. They are free to print, from big easy shapes for preschool to crowded harvest scenes that keep an adult busy for an evening.

Here is how the season breaks down across the sheets:

• Autumn leaves and trees: a page of leaves and acorns scattered edge to edge, a basket of maple leaves, a boy running through a tunnel of falling leaves, two kids jumping in a leaf pile and two more raking the yard.
• Pumpkins everywhere: on the porch, in a wheelbarrow, a pickup truck, a bicycle basket and a pony cart, plus a boy carving a jack o'lantern and a girl painting one.
• Fall animals: a fox in a scarf, fox cubs in the leaves, a squirrel burying an acorn, a hedgehog, a raccoon in a log, a bear fishing for salmon, a stag, owls and geese flying south.
• Farm and harvest: scarecrows, a corn maze, hay bales, a barn, a windmill, a farm stand, a cornucopia and sunflowers.
• Cozy moments: cocoa on the porch, a fireplace with a wreath, soup bowls on the table, a stack of books with a scarf, chestnuts roasting.

Fall leaves coloring pages and why leaves change color

Fall leaves forgive almost any choice, because nearly every warm color is right. There is a scientific reason. All summer, leaves are full of green chlorophyll. As the days shorten, trees stop making it, and the yellow and orange pigments that were there all along show through. Some trees, maples above all, also make new red and purple pigments in the fall.

So a single leaf can honestly be:

• Yellow like a birch or a ginkgo.
• Orange like a sugar maple in October.
• Red like a red maple or a sumac.
• Brown once it has dried on the ground.

The page of autumn leaves and acorns scattered across the page has no picture in the middle, just leaves to fill one by one, and the basket overflowing with maple leaves works the same way. For whole trees in every season, the tree coloring pages take over.

Make your own fall color by number

Many people search for a fall color by number. The scattered leaves page turns into one in a minute:

1. Write a small number in pencil inside each leaf and acorn: 1, 2, 3 or 4.
2. Write the key at the bottom: 1 yellow, 2 orange, 3 red, 4 brown.
3. Hand it over with four crayons.

Fall tree and forest scenes

The fall tree pages are full of movement. A boy runs with his arms up through a tunnel of falling leaves, another climbs a ladder to a treehouse, and a bicycle with a basket of pumpkins waits under a tree as the leaves come down. A girl wrapped in a plaid blanket sits on a park bench under the same falling leaves.

In the woods, a bear holds an acorn among mushrooms and pinecones, a basket of mushrooms sits beside a snail, and spotted toadstools grow among the acorns. Those lead straight into the forest coloring pages and mushroom coloring pages.

To color a forest that glows, keep the sky pale and put the strongest orange and red at the top of the trees, where the light hits.

Fall animals getting ready for winter

The fall animals sheets show what wildlife really does in autumn:

• Squirrels bury acorns one by one to dig up in winter. They forget some, and those acorns can grow into new oaks. See the squirrel coloring pages.
• Geese fly south in a V. Each bird rides the air stirred up by the one in front, which saves energy on a long trip.
• Bears eat as much as they can before their winter sleep, and salmon running upriver are a feast. Bear fans can turn to the bear coloring pages.
• Hedgehogs look for a pile of leaves to sleep under, the way one curls under a blanket of leaves here.

The fox in a scarf and the two fox cubs tumbling in a leaf pile are favorites with younger kids, and more foxes are waiting in the fox coloring pages. Owls show up in the leaves too, one flying over a wheat field under a crescent moon and one perched on a branch, with the owl coloring pages close by. A stag with big antlers walks through tall grass, and a woodpecker taps on a trunk.

Fall pumpkin, apple and harvest pages

Pumpkins ride in nearly every kind of vehicle in this collection, from a wheelbarrow by a garden fence to an old pickup a farmer is loading. A cat sleeps on top of a pile of them and a bunny nibbles a hole in a small one. For a whole patch, see the pumpkin coloring pages.

Apples get their own pages too:

• A bushel basket tipped over on a wooden table.
• An apple pie with a lattice crust beside a jug.
• Candy apples with chocolate drizzle and sprinkles cooling on a rack.
• A farm stand of apples and pumpkins with a tractor behind.

The apple coloring pages carry on into the orchard. The cornucopia, or horn of plenty, overflows with fruits and vegetables, an old harvest symbol that leads to the Thanksgiving coloring pages in November. Scarecrows, hay bales, the barn and the windmill continue in the farm coloring pages.

Fall and Halloween coloring pages for October

Several sheets bridge the two. A boy carves a smiling jack o'lantern at the table, a girl paints a pumpkin instead, and a spider web hangs among the leaves. Three pumpkins wait on the porch beside the door mat, ready for trick or treaters. When October turns spooky, the Halloween coloring pages take over with witches and ghosts.

Characters celebrate the season as well. Hello Kitty hugs a pumpkin under the words HELLO FALL (see her own Hello Kitty coloring pages), Disney's Stitch does the same in the Stitch coloring pages, and Snoopy peeks out of a leaf pile in the Snoopy coloring pages.

Preschool fall coloring pages with big shapes

Many sheets keep to one animal or one object: the hedgehog, the raccoon in the log, the acorn-burying squirrel, the girl splashing in a puddle, the geese, the candy apples. Switch on Quick to color and the lone animals and pumpkins with almost no background rise to the top of the grid:

• Bear cub catching a salmon
• Squirrel burying an acorn
• Cat on the pumpkins

For a preschool fall unit, pair a page with a walk. Collect a few real leaves, set them beside the sheet and let the child match the colors. The dandelion and the kite on a windy hill make a good page for talking about wind.

Adult fall coloring pages: corn mazes and firesides

Adult fall coloring tends toward full scenes, and this collection has many: the corn maze seen from above, the fireplace with candles and hot apple cider, the farm stand, three tall sunflowers with bees, the picnic with a lantern. Press Lots of detail and the scenes crowded with corn stalks, barn shingles and drifting leaves come forward:

• Basket of mushrooms with a snail
• Sunflowers in a garden with bees and a butterfly
• Farm stand with apples and pumpkins

Colored pencils layered from yellow to red make the leaves glow. The cozy coloring pages and adult coloring pages have more slow pages for long evenings.

Fall pages from the printer to the window

The sheets come as free 300 dpi PDFs sized for A4, so an A4 printer takes them as they are, while a US Letter printer needs fit to page to keep the outer leaves on the paper. Colored leaves and pumpkins look good cut out and taped to a window, so print a few spares. Add to pack gathers a whole season of pages into one download, and the printing guide walks through the printer settings.