Halloween Coloring Pages

A ghost takes a bubble bath while a cat watches from the window, and a skeleton knits by the fire. These Halloween coloring pages keep the familiar cast of October (pumpkins, black cats, witches, ghosts, bats and skeletons) and give each of them something to do. All of them are free to print, with thick black outlines, drawn cute rather than creepy, from big pumpkins a toddler can fill to cozy haunted kitchens that keep an adult busy for an evening.

Who shows up for October, and doing what:

• Halloween cats: in witch hats, on broomsticks, on carved pumpkins, asleep in a knitting basket, behind a bakery counter.
• Pumpkins and jack-o'-lanterns: a pumpkin family, a stack of three, a market stall, a carving party on the porch.
• Witches, ghosts, skeletons and mummies, busy with tea parties, laundry, knitting and spell lessons.
• Animals in costume: a fox, a hedgehog, a bunny, a frog in a cauldron, a raccoon, a T. rex and a teddy bear in a skeleton suit.
• Trick or treat: mummies with candy bags, a robot and a zombie at the door, a cat and a dog in skeleton costumes.
• Haunted houses among tombstones under a full moon.
• Cozy Halloween rooms: libraries, kitchens, a potion shop, a blanket fort.

Cute Halloween coloring pages, not scary ones

The drawings share a soft, rounded style: round eyes, smiling faces, a mummy waving with its trick-or-treat bag. A teacher can hand them to a whole class of four-year-olds without anyone going home upset.

Even the classic monsters are friendly here. A Frankenstein monster smiles between two beakers, a little vampire brushes its teeth in a bathroom hung with paper bats, a werewolf and a Frankenstein boy roast marshmallows in a garden, and two monsters hide in a blanket fort with a torch. More of them live in the monster coloring pages.

How to make a page look spooky

Older kids who want scary or spooky Halloween coloring pages can get there with color rather than with frightening faces. The haunted houses, the skeleton picnic among the tombstones and the vampire in a gothic mansion turn eerie with the right palette:

• Limit the page to purple, green, orange and black.
• Color the night sky in dark blue or purple, not black. Black pencil over a big area goes shiny and patchy.
• Keep windows and the moon yellow, so the warm light stands out against the dark.
• Leave ghosts as white paper and color everything around them.

Halloween cat coloring pages

The black cat is on more of these sheets than any other animal. Cats ride broomsticks, wear witch hats, stir cauldrons, sit on carved pumpkins, leap a picket fence, sleep on a pile of spellbooks and run a bakery counter of pumpkin cupcakes for an owl and another cat. One curls up asleep in a basket of yarn and knitting needles.

Cats were tied to witches in the folklore of medieval Europe, and a black cat was often said to be a witch's companion. That is why the witch in her potion shop and the witch cooking in her kitchen each have one beside them.

Solid black flattens a cat. Use dark gray for the body and save the deepest black for ear tips, tail and outline. The cat coloring pages have black cats for the rest of the year.

Bats, owls and spiders

Bats hang upside down from branches, fly over the porch and share a book with an owl in a candlelit library. Owls wear witch hats and carry lanterns, and a spider spins its web in the shape of a bat. Real bats and owls, without the hats, fill the bat coloring pages and the owl coloring pages.

Halloween witch coloring pages, ghosts and skeletons

The Halloween witch is rarely flying here. She knits in a rocking chair, cooks in a kitchen lined with jars, sorts bundles of herbs in a stone cellar with a ghost, and teaches spells to an owl and a skeleton at a chalkboard.

Ghosts take bubble baths, write letters, water plants, play board games with a cat and sit down to soup at a dinner table. The cozy ghosts have a whole collection of their own in the ghost coloring pages.

Skeletons are just as domestic: a skeleton family waving, a skeleton knitting by the fire, two having a picnic among the tombstones, one sharing popcorn on the sofa with a ghost. For skeletons dressed in flowers instead, the Day of the Dead coloring pages cover the Mexican holiday that follows on November 1 and 2.

Halloween pumpkin coloring pages and the first jack-o'-lanterns

Pumpkins turn up on nearly every page, and some sheets are all pumpkin: a smiling pumpkin family, three stacked inside a spider web, a jack-o'-lantern rolling downhill through falling leaves, a market stall of pumpkins and gourds under a striped awning, and children in costume carving pumpkins on a porch with a bucket of seeds.

The first jack-o'-lanterns were not pumpkins at all. In Ireland and Scotland, faces were cut into hollowed turnips for the old festival of Samhain. Irish and Scottish immigrants brought the custom to North America, where the bigger, softer pumpkin took over.

To color a pumpkin:

1. Fill it with a light orange.
2. Go over the grooves between the ribs with a darker orange or brown.
3. Color the carved face yellow, so it looks lit from inside.

Jack-o'-lanterns of every size and grin are stacked up in the pumpkin coloring pages, and the fall coloring pages keep the leaves and scarecrows going into November.

Pumpkins and waving candy: easy Halloween pages for little ones

For preschool Halloween, pick sheets with big shapes and few small areas: the pumpkin family, the lollipop and the candy corn waving, a bat hanging from a branch, a hedgehog sitting in a pumpkin with the lid on its head. Those are the sheets Quick to color brings forward, big pumpkins and smiling sweets before any haunted house:

• Pumpkin hat hedgehog
• Smiling lollipop, wrapped candies and candy corn
• Wolf howling by a tombstone

A child who finishes early can move on to a sheet with a little more going on, like the bunny hopping between rows of jack-o'-lanterns or the frog in a cauldron.

The kawaii candy scene, a pumpkin and a lollipop with faces under the moon, sits well beside the kawaii coloring pages. For more wrapped sweets and candy corn, try the candy coloring pages.

Haunted kitchens and libraries: Halloween coloring pages for adults

Many sheets are whole rooms packed with small objects: a bookshelf of candles and decorations, a costume closet, a greenhouse where a girl in a witch hat and a frog each hold a plant, a family of mice carving pumpkins in their kitchen, a witch and two ghosts at a tea party. Lots of detail opens on these rooms, shelf after shelf of tiny jars and books:

• Owl and bat reading in a library
• Cart of ghost cupcakes
• Porch swing with blankets and a lantern

For adult Halloween coloring pages, sharp colored pencils work best, which reach into corners that markers cannot. For slow interiors without the costumes, the cozy coloring pages keep the same mood all year, and the adult coloring pages gather the detailed sheets from every subject.

Favorite characters in Halloween costume

Children often want a favorite character in costume. Each costume sheet sits with its character:

• Hello Kitty in a witch hat on a big jack-o'-lantern under HAPPY HALLOWEEN, or dressed as a little ghost, among the Hello Kitty coloring pages.
• Bluey with a carving knife and a pumpkin in the garden, then out with a candy bucket, in the Bluey coloring pages.
• Stitch on a jack-o'-lantern under HAPPY HALLOWEEN, in the Stitch coloring pages.
• Kuromi stirring a bubbling cauldron in a starry witch hat, in the Kuromi coloring pages.
• Chase and Skye in witch hats and capes, in the Paw Patrol coloring pages.
• Scooby-Doo carving a jack-o'-lantern on a picnic table, in the Scooby-Doo coloring pages.

A Halloween class party plan

1. Print a week ahead, before every teacher in the building needs the copier on the same afternoon.
2. Choose several different drawings rather than one, so children can pick and nobody compares their witch with the next one.
3. Print a copy for each child, a few spares, and some busy scenes for those who finish first.
4. Let each child color what they are dressing up as: witch, mummy, skeleton, black cat or pumpkin.

After the party, tape the finished pages to a window with the colored side facing out. From the sidewalk after dark, the orange glows. To make a small Halloween coloring book, collect the favorites with Add to pack, print them as one PDF and staple the stack for a party bag.

Printing in the October rush

Switch off draft or toner-saving mode before a big Halloween run: it thins the black outlines to gray, and a night sky colored over gray lines swallows them.

Black night skies and black cats use a lot of ink, so a home printer on draft mode may leave them streaky; normal quality is safer. The files are free 300 dpi PDFs in A4 size. With Letter paper in the tray, fit to page keeps the witch hats and broom tips inside the margins. The printing guide shows each step, and a whole classroom or party can print these at no cost. When October is over, the Thanksgiving coloring pages have the next date ready.