October Coloring Pages

October is a month, not one night

Most free October coloring pages are Halloween pages wearing a different label. We already have those — twenty of them — along with twenty ghosts, twenty autumn pages and twenty apples. So this set went looking for the rest of the month and found it: the two great October festivals, the harvest that happens before the costumes come out, and the plain useful things a classroom wants in October. If a pumpkin appears here it is being carved or sitting in a corn maze, not grinning on a doorstep.

Diwali and the Day of the Dead

These are the two pages-worth of October that almost no free printable set covers, and there are five of them here. Diwali — the festival of lights, which falls in October or early November — gets a row of five oil lamps on a rangoli floor pattern, a house front lit with diyas under fireworks, and an intricate mirrored rangoli with two peacocks for older colourists. The Day of the Dead gets a three-tiered ofrenda with blank photo frames to draw your own faces into, and a big friendly calavera left almost entirely blank so a child can decorate it themselves. Both were drawn warm and festive rather than spooky, because that is what they are. For twenty more — La Catrina, papel picado, pan de muerto and dancing calacas — see the sugar skull coloring pages.

Pages you finish yourself

The October calendar is a real five-by-seven grid — thirty-five empty boxes, which is what a thirty-one-day month needs — with nothing printed in them, so the same sheet works every year. The dress-up page gives you a plain undecorated child and fourteen separate costume pieces around them: five hats, five outfits, four props. The sugar skull has its eyes, nose and teeth drawn and everything else left white. The nature journal has weather symbols, four empty collecting boxes and ruled lines for what you found on the walk.

Nothing is filled in black

A carved pumpkin is the hardest test in an October set, because every printable draws the cut-out eyes and mouth as solid black holes. Here they are hollow outlines with white middles — shapes to colour rather than ink to print. The same goes for the sugar skulls’ eye sockets, which hold outlined flowers instead of black voids, and for the two night pages: the Diwali fireworks and the harvest moon both sit on plain white paper, because a printed black sky empties a cartridge and colours nothing.

For the youngest colourists

The five easy pages have very thick outlines and big open shapes — the marigold is one bloom filling the sheet, and the harvest moon is mostly one huge circle with nine craters in it. The nine middle pages each have a scene or an activity. The six detailed pages — the mandala, the peacock rangoli, the specimen plate, the papel picado banners, the cornucopia and the Harvest Time lettering — are for an adult and an evening.

The rest of the season

This set leaves Halloween itself to the pages that already cover it. For jack-o-lanterns, witches, bats and the haunted house see the Halloween coloring pages; there are twenty ghost coloring pages as well. For leaves, acorns, squirrels and the pumpkin patch see the fall and autumn coloring pages, and for apple picking and toffee apples the apple coloring pages. The month after is here too: November coloring pages.

Print the whole set at once

Every page is a PDF in both US Letter and A4, and the whole set downloads as one ZIP. No account, no email, no watermark.