Stranger Things Coloring Pages

Stranger Things is as much about a place and a decade as about its monster. These Stranger Things coloring pages draw both: the town of the 1980s where kids ride bikes after dark and talk on walkie talkies, and the strange world hiding underneath it.

Eleven is here the ways fans remember her: sitting cross-legged beside a stack of waffles with her shaved head and striped dress, strapped into a lab chair in a hospital gown with wires taped to her head, and holding up one hand as a delivery van flips through the air. Lucas checks a compass and a map at a fork in a forest path, in his bandana. The Demogorgon stands in a foggy clearing with its flower-shaped head, and the Upside Down gets two pages: a forest thick with floating spores and curling vines, and a clearing where a kid holds up a torch while flakes drift upward.

The town fills the rest. Kids race their bikes down a street of mailboxes and across a steel bridge with cars behind them, a boy calls a friend on his walkie talkie from the porch, another pedals with a flashlight strapped to his handlebars, and a bike lies abandoned by a hole in a chain link fence. The Palace Arcade lines up its cabinets, a basement table holds a dungeon map and a scatter of polyhedral dice, a blanket fort glows with string lights, and a girl reaches up to touch one of the bulbs strung along a wall. There is a school science bench, a hallway of lockers, a kitchen with a wall phone and a coiled cord, a bedroom wall of band posters beside a record player, the town pool, the mall fountain, a police car with a hat and a coffee cup on the hood, a radio tower on a hill, a cabin in the woods, the lab corridor of vault doors, a pumpkin patch at night, kids in homemade ghost and robot costumes, a pillow fort by the window, and a kid under an umbrella on a rainy street.

The 1980s, in objects

Much of the show's charm is the stuff: things a child today has never touched. That makes these pages a small history lesson for anyone growing up with a smartphone.

The walkie talkie was how friends kept in touch before phones, with a range of a few miles if you were lucky, and everyone on the same channel could hear you. The wall telephone was the only phone in the house, fixed to the kitchen wall, and its coiled cord was stretched as far as it would go for any private call. The arcade was where you played video games, one coin per game, standing up. And the dungeon map and many-sided dice belong to tabletop role-playing games, played around a basement table on a Saturday, where one player tells the story and the others decide what their characters do.

Show a child the kitchen page and ask them to find the phone. Many will not recognize it.

Coloring the Upside Down and the string lights

The show uses two moods, and the pages can too. The ordinary town is warm and bright: blue sky, green lawns, red bikes, a wood-paneled basement. The Upside Down is cold and dark. Color its sky and trees in deep blue-gray and charcoal, the vines in dark red-brown, and leave the floating spores as small white or pale gray dots, so they look like they glow. A single warm color, the orange of the torch, makes the kid stand out against it.

The string lights are the show's most famous image: bulbs on a wall that light up to spell out a message. On the page with the hand reaching for the bulbs, color each bulb a different bright color, red, blue, yellow and green, and leave a small white spot in each so it looks lit.

Easy pages and busy ones in Hawkins

Most of these pages are scenes with a whole room or street around them, which suits a fan of eight or more who already knows the show. A few keep one figure large on a light background, the Demogorgon in the fog and Eleven with her hand raised among them. Quick to color, above the grid, gathers those:

• Demogorgon in a foggy forest
• Eleven lifting a van with her mind
• School lockers with a backpack

The densest are the places: the cabin in the woods, the mall fountain, the fence where a bike lies in the grass, where every board, tile and leaf is its own shape. Lots of detail opens on:

• Bike by a hole in the fence
• Mall fountain
• Cabin in the woods

A Stranger Things party, and a note on age

For a themed party or a binge-watch night, a few pages make easy decorations. Color the string lights page and tape it to the door, lay the dungeon map and the dice page on the snack table, and give each guest a character page. The waffle page belongs next to a real plate of waffles, the way Eleven would want it. The costume page, with its sheet ghost and cardboard robot, is a reminder that the best Halloween costumes are homemade.

The show itself is rated for teens and has frightening scenes. These pages leave the scares out: the Demogorgon stands calmly in the fog, and the Upside Down is eerie rather than gory, so they suit fans of any age who already know the story.

Printing for a watch party

The files are free 300 dpi PDFs drawn to the A4 format. Letter-size printers need "fit to page", which trims each scene by roughly six percent; A4 printers take them as they are. The printing guide has pictures of the dialog for each browser. Collect the pages you want with Add to pack and they arrive as a single file, ready before the first episode starts. For more nights like this, the Halloween coloring pages and the monster coloring pages carry on the spooky side.