Pumpkin Coloring Pages

October pumpkins are usually drawn with a face cut into them, and that is a small part of what a pumpkin actually is. These free printable pumpkin coloring pages follow the whole thing instead: a seed in a pot, a flower with two bees in it, a field in long rows, a barrow, a farm shop, a kitchen, and only then a carved lantern on a gatepost.

It makes the collection usable for longer than one week. A greenhouse bench of seedlings suits a spring topic on growing; the field and the roadside table suit September; the pie, the muffins and the soup suit November; the three lanterns suit the last night of October.

The sheet to print thirty times

Quick to color above the grid narrows it to those, quickest first.

• A spiced latte with a cinnamon stick
• A mouse asleep inside a pumpkin
• A pie with one slice lifted

The single pumpkin is the one to print thirty times for a nursery. It is one shape, ribbed, with a curling stem, and a three-year-old can fill it properly and be pleased with the result.

The two-orange rule

Almost every sheet here comes down to the same technique, and it is worth saying once at the table:

• A lighter orange down the front of each rib, a darker orange in the grooves. Nothing else. The pumpkin turns round.
• Stems go gray-green, not brown, and the curling tendrils the same.
• Leaves take two greens with the veins picked out darker.
• A carved face is filled with yellow, with the orange kept outside it. It reads as candlelight through the shell.
• Gourds are the exception: the bumpy ones want three or four colors in patches, since that is what they really look like.
• Skies go pale blue or gray. The pumpkins are the strongest color on the page and should stay that way.

From the patch to the kitchen

The growing sheets run in a sequence you can print in order: the seedling on the bench with its seed packet and trowel, the greenhouse rows, the flower with the bees, the fruit swelling on the vine, the field, the crates stacked at the field edge.

Then the carrying: two children hauling one big pumpkin between them down a field track, a wheelbarrow in the furrows with a pair of gloves on top, a pony drawing a loaded cart along a hedged lane.

Then the kitchen, which is where the detail is: a pumpkin halved on a board showing its seeds, beside a knife and a bowl of cubes. Seeds spread on a baking tray with a dish of salt. A leaf-topped pie with one slice lifted away. Muffins cooling on a wire rack. A pan of soup on the hob with two empty bowls waiting.

The animals

Several sheets belong to the creatures that find a pumpkin before anyone else does, and they are the ones children pick first. A mouse asleep on a leaf inside a pumpkin cut open at the front, with two acorns beside it. A hedgehog nosing at the seeds spilling from a toppled lantern. Three squirrels around one pumpkin, with one sitting on top. A frog on a pumpkin in a puddle while rain runs off the leaves above.

Windows, jars and the last week of October

An orange drawing does something in a window that nothing else in the catalogue does, and it is worth using before the season turns.

Tape a colored lantern to the glass with the colored side facing the street. From the pavement after dark, with a lamp on inside, the orange glows and the carved face reads from a distance. Three at different heights on the same window look deliberate rather than accidental.

The smaller sheets have a second use in the kitchen. Cut a pumpkin out, trim it to a circle, and it becomes the lid label for a jar of chutney or a bag of seeds, with the date written across the shell. A child who has helped scoop out a real pumpkin will fight for the job.

For a harvest table: print the single ribbed pumpkin at half size, one per person, color, and stand each one behind a plate as a place marker. The wreath sheet, colored and cut round its outer edge, lies flat in the middle of the same table as a mat for a hot dish, if you glue it to card first.

And the field sheets, which nobody thinks to use, are the ones that hold up longest. Colored in September and pinned inside a cupboard door, they are still worth looking at in November, which is not true of a carved face.

The fall coloring pages carry the same season without the harvest, the Halloween pages take the end of the month, and the Thanksgiving pages take the table afterwards.

Pumpkins, gourds and squashes

The fruit on these pages come in three overlapping groups, and the names are worth sorting out because children ask.

A pumpkin is a squash, a squash is a fruit, and botanically all of them are berries, which is the fact that stops a nine-year-old in their tracks. The split people actually use is: summer squash picked young with soft skin, like courgettes; winter squash left to harden so it keeps for months, like pumpkins and butternuts; and ornamental gourds, bred for shape and bumps rather than eating.

The bumps on the warted gourds in this collection are real. They are caused deliberately through breeding, and the same varieties come out knobbly every year.

The lantern tradition is older than the pumpkin's part in it. In Ireland and Scotland the carved vegetable was a turnip or a swede, hollowed out and lit to keep something unpleasant away on the night the harvest ended. Emigrants to America found pumpkins, which are enormously easier to carve, and never looked back.

One more for the field sheets: a pumpkin grows on a vine along the ground, not on a bush, and it can put on several kilos in a day at its peak. The record is over a tonne.

The dense end, for an evening in October

Lots of detail gathers the crowded end and shows the busiest sheet first.

• Long rows of a pumpkin field
• A greenhouse bench of young plants
• A wreath of pumpkins and leaves

The farm shop shelves and the roadside table are the ones to keep for an evening: pumpkins and knobbled gourds in rows, baskets, crates and blank boards. The fall coloring pages carry the same season without the harvest, and the Halloween pages take over at the end of the month.

Each sheet is a free A4 PDF at 300 dpi, with no sign-up. Print at 100 % scale on A4, or "fit to page" on US Letter so nothing is cut off; the printing guide explains the difference. Press Add to pack under each sheet you want and print them together as one PDF.