Thanksgiving colouring page

A fan-tailed turkey and a spilling cornucopia in black outline, sized for A4 paper and ready to print.

Two things share this page: a turkey standing in profile with one round eye and a wattle under its beak, and a woven cornucopia tipped on its side, spilling two pumpkins, two corn cobs and three maple leaves. The turkey's tail is fanned open and drawn as large separate feathers rather than one solid mass, so the biggest area of the sheet arrives already divided into pieces you can colour one at a time. Black outlines, white paper, and no grey anywhere to work around.

The fanned tail is where the sheet is decided. Each feather is its own closed shape, which makes a repeating sequence easy: two or three colours cycled across the fan, or a single colour that gets slightly darker from the centre feather out to the edges. Working outward from the middle keeps the sequence honest, since the outer feathers are the ones easiest to lose track of. Filling every feather the same brown is also fine, and it leaves the cornucopia as the busier half of the page.

The body under the fan is a smaller shape than it first looks, and it carries the head, the beak, the wattle and the single round eye. The wattle is the one place on the bird where a strong red belongs, and leaving the eye white with only the pupil filled keeps the face awake. Colouring the body a shade darker than the innermost tail feathers separates the bird from its own tail, which otherwise tends to close up into one continuous brown block across the middle of the sheet.

The cornucopia is drawn as a woven horn, with the strips narrowing as they run back towards the closed end. Following the strips with the pencil rather than crossing them makes that taper visible without any shading. The mouth of the horn is the natural place for the darkest tone on the sheet, since everything spilling out of it is bright and needs something to come out of. Leaving the inner rim white is the alternative, and it gives the fruit a clean edge to sit against.

Two pumpkins, two corn cobs and three maple leaves come out of the horn, which gives you seven small shapes to vary. Corn kernels are drawn as rows, so a single yellow across each cob reads correctly and takes seconds; a second, deeper yellow on alternating rows takes longer and looks more like corn. Maple leaves turn through yellow, orange and red in autumn, which means all three leaves can be different colours and none of them will look wrong on the page.

The two halves of the drawing sit side by side, so the page holds together better if something links them. Repeating one of the tail colours in a maple leaf, or the pumpkin orange in an outer feather, is enough to do it. If you would rather they stay separate, keep the bird in browns and the spill in warm reds and yellows, and let the white paper between them do the dividing. That white gap is part of the drawing and does not need to be filled in.

This is a sheet for the long stretch while the meal is cooking and the table is not set yet. Coloured, it lies flat as a centrepiece under a bowl, or it gets cut into pieces: a maple leaf becomes a place card once a name is written across it, the turkey becomes the front of a folded card, the cornucopia goes on the door. Cutting around the fanned tail takes patience, so a rough cut a little outside the outline is the practical choice.

We built the PDF at A4, which prints from a home printer at full size with no scaling. Card holds up better if the leaves or the turkey are going to be cut out and handled at the table. The PNG previews show the drawing before anything is sent to the printer. If more than one person is colouring, printing several copies is easier than sharing a single page, since the tail alone is a long piece of work.

Published 28 August 2026Updated 28 August 2026686 words