I have a bit of a thing for vintage Halloween. Old postcards, magazines, catalogs, advertisements, decorations, random bits of paper ephemera—I can happily lose an unreasonable amount of time looking through all of it. I love the grinning pumpkins, enormous black cats, witches flying through strange little moonscapes, spooky owls and ravens, and illustrations where you’re not entirely sure what the artist was going for, but you’re delighted they went there anyway. So I made a set of free printable vintage Halloween coloring pages inspired by all that wonderful old stuff. There are witches, black cats, jack-o’-lanterns, skeletons, scarecrows, owls, ravens and even a glamorous 1920s Halloween party girl. They’re not reproductions of antique artwork, but they borrow heavily from the wonderfully weird visual language of old Halloween postcards and illustrations.
Check out our popular skulls adult coloring pages while you’re here!
These coloring pages are my way of taking something I genuinely love and making it a little more accessible. You don’t need to hunt through antique shops, bid against a determined stranger on eBay, or worry about destroying something that’s survived since 1912. Print a page and scribble all over it. That’s what it’s FOR.
Halloween Used to Be Weirder
One of my favorite things about antique Halloween imagery is that it isn’t always cute and it isn’t always scary. It’s somewhere in between. A pumpkin might be smiling at you, but perhaps a little TOO enthusiastically. A black cat might be adorable while simultaneously looking like it knows exactly when you’re going to die.
I wanted to keep some of that weirdness in these pages. They’re not horror coloring pages and there’s nothing particularly gruesome here, but I didn’t want to sand off all the spooky bits and make everything relentlessly adorable, either. Halloween gets to be a little creepy.
Print Them, Color Them, Cut Them Up
Use whatever you already have: crayons, colored pencils, markers, cheap watercolor paints, whatever. Color them with your kids, put a few out at a Halloween party, or sit down with one yourself while watching a terrible horror movie. Cut up the finished pages for collage, hang them on the refrigerator, stick one in a cheap frame for October, or print another copy because you completely screwed up the first one.
You don’t need special supplies, and you definitely don’t need to be “good” at coloring. You also don’t need to turn the finished thing into content, sell it, perfect it, or optimize a goddamn thing.
Sometimes you can just color a spooky owl.
