Fall Coloring Pages: 90 Free Printable PDFs

The detailed book is the one to reach for if you want to sit down properly. Its thirty pages are full scenes rather than single objects: a covered bridge over a stream, a farm stand loaded with knobbly gourds, a raccoon peering out of a hollow stump, geese crossing a stubble field. There is a lot of line work per page, and colouring one properly takes an evening rather than ten minutes.

The cute book is the crowd pleaser. Everything is rounded and everything has a face, including the cocoa mug, the wellington boots and the maple leaf drifting past. It leans domestic rather than outdoorsy, so alongside the squirrel and the hedgehog you get a cat asleep in a basket of yarn, a stack of books under a smiling mug, and a folded sweater with a cable pattern.

The simple book is built for the youngest hands. One subject fills the page, the outlines are marker thick, and everything else is kept well clear of it so nothing accidentally gets coloured together. A pumpkin, an acorn, a squirrel, a pair of boots. If you are printing for a preschool table or a classroom, this is the one to run off in bulk.

Leaves turn up across all three books and they are the easiest thing here to colour well. The simple book gives you one enormous maple leaf with a single vein down the middle, which is about as forgiving as a page gets. The detailed book buries them everywhere, drifting past the barn, gathered against the shed door, heaped beside a rake outside a cottage.

Pumpkins run the same way. There is a wheelbarrow of them in a bare harvested field, rows growing on curling vines below a windmill, three lined up on a cottage porch beside a sleeping cat, and one big grinning one on its own for the three year olds. None of them are carved, which keeps this collection firmly autumn rather than Halloween.

The rest of the harvest season is here too: an apple orchard with baskets under the tree, a pony hitched to a cart of apples, corn stalks tied in bundles around a scarecrow, and a table set outside with two pies and a teapot. If you want the page that most says October, try the bonfire ringed with stones between the log benches.

Half of what people mean by fall happens indoors, and the cute book is where that lives. There is a mug of cocoa in a knitted scarf, a candle beside a folded blanket, a cat curled in a basket of yarn balls, and a window seat with a blanket and a stack of books while a tree sheds its leaves outside.

These pages are the ones that hold up best when printed small, because the shapes stay big and open even at postcard size. If you want something to colour together on a wet afternoon rather than something to frame, start here. They also make the best garlands, since each subject is a single compact shape that cuts out cleanly.

The crisp weather pages sit in the middle: boots standing in a puddle with smiling raindrops above them, a bunny sheltering under an enormous leaf, a fox in a chunky scarf. Warm colours work against your instincts on these, so try leaving the sweater pale and putting all the colour into the leaves behind it.

Every animal in the detailed book is doing something seasonal rather than just standing there. A squirrel sits at the foot of an oak with an acorn in its paws, a chipmunk perches on a dry stone wall beside a scattered pile of them, another squirrel is curled asleep in a leaf lined hollow partway up a trunk. It reads as a set rather than a collection of unrelated animals.

The bigger animals get the wider shots. A deer stands among bare trunks in a quiet forest, a fox walks through a carpet of leaves with its tail out behind it, three sheep graze a hillside below thinning trees. These are the pages worth putting on heavier paper, because the fine line work in the backgrounds is where the detail lives.

In the cute book the same animals go chibi: an owl in a pompom beanie, a raccoon carrying a basket of acorns, a chipmunk with its cheeks comically full. Children who find the detailed forest a bit much will happily work through six of these in a sitting.

Each book opens as a single fall coloring pages pdf in the reader, so you can print one page to test a palette or run the whole set at once. For the simple and cute books ordinary copy paper is completely fine, since those pages are large open shapes and children mostly reach for crayons and pencils.

The detailed book is worth putting on heavier stock, around 120 gsm, if markers are involved. Its forest and orchard scenes pack fine lines close together and thin paper lets the ink feather across them. Colored pencils are perfectly happy on copy paper either way.

Print in portrait at 100% rather than fit to page. Every design already has a generous margin, so scaling down only shrinks the areas you want to colour. If you are running off a stack of fall coloring pages printable for a classroom, print one test page first and check the border frame is not being clipped.

The simple pages cut out beautifully, and a row of coloured leaves taped along a window is the cheapest autumn decoration there is. Backlit by afternoon sun they look far better than the effort involved. Pumpkins and acorns work the same way.

The cute pages make a good garland. Punch two holes along the top of each finished sheet, thread twine through, and ten of them across a doorway takes an afternoon. They also make decent gift tags if you cut around a single acorn or leaf.

The detailed scenes are the ones to frame, and they reward being treated as a series. Pick four, colour them across a few evenings in the same limited palette, and hang them together. Warm browns and dusty oranges with one cooler colour held back for the sky is the version of this that looks most deliberate. However you use them, these free fall coloring pages are free to download and print as often as you like.