Mushroom Coloring Pages

Mushrooms have moved from the forest floor to sweaters, lamps and teacups, and they have always been a favorite on paper: the round cap is fun to fill and the spots never end. These mushroom coloring pages mix the storybook toadstool with the real mushrooms people go looking for in the woods.

The storybook side comes first. A cluster of tall spotted toadstools grows from a mossy log, a fat mushroom has a front door and stone steps, another has a round window and a crooked chimney, and a whole village of mushroom houses lines both banks of a stream. A giant mushroom has a spiral staircase winding up its stem. A gnome sits on a mushroom stool with a basket of berries, a fairy sleeps on moss inside an upturned cap, and a mushroom-shaped paper lantern hangs over a picnic blanket in the woods.

Animals keep the mushrooms company. A snail rests on a wet cap after the rain, a hedgehog carries one through fallen leaves, a frog shelters under another like an umbrella, a mouse holds one over its head to cross a puddle, a squirrel hangs mushrooms on a string to dry for winter, a rabbit nibbles one among the ferns, a beetle climbs a thin stem and a tortoise wears a crop of tiny mushrooms along its shell. Two mushrooms with faces hold hands in the clover, and a chibi mushroom skips over pebbles.

The real mushrooms are drawn the way a field guide would show them: oyster mushrooms stepping up a birch trunk, chanterelles in pine needles, morels with honeycomb caps, enoki in a jar, a fairy ring around a stump, a single mushroom with every gill drawn, a stump crowded with tiny caps, and mushrooms pushing out of a crack in an old stone wall. A basket of wild finds, a cook slicing mushrooms with herbs, a flower pot on a windowsill, a mushroom cake, a mandala with ferns and a border of mushrooms and acorns complete the collection.

What you see is only a small part of the fungus

The mushroom is not the whole organism. It is the fruit of a fungus that lives out of sight, a network of fine white threads called mycelium spread through the soil or through a rotting log. The mushroom pushes up only to release spores, millions of them, from the gills or pores under the cap.

That hidden network explains the fairy ring on one of the pages. The threads grow outward from a starting point in every direction, like ripples in a pond, and the mushrooms come up along the outer edge, so they appear in a circle. Old stories said it was where fairies had danced, and the name stuck.

Toadstools, and the rule about picking

There is no scientific line between a mushroom and a toadstool. "Toadstool" is just the old word for the ones that look like trouble, and the red cap with white spots in so many drawings is a real mushroom, the fly agaric, which is poisonous. The white spots are what is left of a skin that covered the young mushroom, and heavy rain can wash them off.

It is worth saying out loud while children color these pages: a wild mushroom is never picked to eat unless an expert has checked it. Even the chanterelles and morels drawn here have look-alikes that make people ill. Coloring the fly agaric bright red is a good way to remember it as the one to leave alone.

Colors from the woods

• Fly agaric: scarlet cap, white spots, white gills and stem.
• Chanterelles: egg-yolk orange-yellow all over, gills included.
• Morels: tan to dark brown, darker in the pits of the honeycomb, with a pale stem.
• Oyster mushrooms: gray, cream or pale blue-gray, lighter at the edge.
• Enoki: creamy white, almost no color at all, which makes the jar of dark soil the strongest part of the page.

For the storybook toadstools, anything goes. A cap shaded from dark at the top to light at the rim looks round, and leaving a curved strip of white paper near the top of the cap makes it shine.

Mostly busy pages, a few simple ones

Mushrooms come with moss, leaves, pine needles and grass, so most of these pages are full ones for patient hands. The simplest page, for a quick one, is:

• Mushroom and acorn border

The densest are the ones where every leaf, pebble and dew drop is its own shape. Lots of detail begins with:

• Mushroom lantern over a picnic
• Basket of wild mushrooms
• Wheelbarrow full of mushrooms

For a young child, the single spotted mushrooms, the chibi mushroom and the two mushroom friends in the clover keep the shapes large.

Make a real spore print next to your drawing

Pair a colored page with a small experiment. Take a store-bought mushroom with open gills, such as a flat brown one from the supermarket, cut off the stem and lay the cap gills down on a sheet of paper. Cover it with a bowl and leave it overnight. In the morning, lift the cap: the spores that fell have drawn a star of fine lines on the paper, an exact print of the gills. Glue it beside the colored page of the mushroom with every gill drawn, and the two make a small nature poster. Wash hands afterward, and keep to shop mushrooms for this.

Printing a basket of mushrooms

All the pages are free A4 PDFs at 300 dpi. They print at full size on A4, and on US Letter "fit to page" shrinks them about six percent so the edge of the forest floor stays on the sheet. The printing guide shows where to find it. Add to pack gathers a few pages into one file. The gnome and fairy pages go well with the fairy coloring pages, the woodland ones with the fall coloring pages and the tree coloring pages, and the garden ones with the flower coloring pages.