Turkey Coloring Pages

The handprint turkey, properly done

Every child in the country makes a handprint turkey and the page that ranks for turkeys does not have one. Ours prints as a single bold hand outline — the thumb is the head with its wattle and beak, the four fingers are the tail feathers and they are left completely blank so they can be decorated. A dashed cut line runs round the whole thing, and below it sit the loose pieces to add: five more tail feathers in graded sizes, a pair of feet, a spare wattle, a beak and two eyes.

Blank feathers to decorate

One page is a turkey with twelve enormous tail feathers and nothing at all inside them — no vein line, no pattern, nothing. Along the bottom is a row of eight pattern samples on little tags to copy from: rings, a zigzag, wavy stripes, scallops, a flower, hearts, diagonals and a spiral. The decorating is the activity.

Real turkeys as well as cartoon ones

Half the set is the actual bird. There is a wild tom in full display with his tail fanned into eighteen stiff feathers, a close-up portrait of a bare caruncled head and neck, a tom beside a hen drawn so the difference between them is obvious at a glance, a mother with six poults at her feet, a flock picking through open woodland, birds roosting in a tree under a crescent moon, and three foraging among the corn stalks at harvest.

Nothing is printed dark for you

Turkeys are the hardest bird to draw for colouring, because nearly everything that makes one recognisable is dark — the plumage, the legs, the beard on the chest, the lumpy skin of the neck. On most pages all of it arrives pre-blacked. Here every feather is a separate outline you can colour one at a time, each leg is drawn as a column of scale bands, the beard is six separate feathers with white between them and the neck caruncles are large open lumps. There is no hatching or shading anywhere in the set.

Easy through to detailed

The toddler page is one enormous turkey with five plain feathers and about twelve areas on the whole sheet. The number page has five feathers carrying the numerals 1 to 5. The middle pages will hold a school-age child for half an hour. The detailed pages — the portrait, the ornamental turkey, the mandala, the stained glass window and the doodle sheet — will take an adult most of an evening.

Print the whole set at once

The button at the top bundles all twenty into a single download. Every page is a vector PDF at 300 DPI in both US Letter and A4, so it stays sharp however far you zoom in.