Autumn colouring page

A maple leaf, a chestnut leaf, an acorn, a split spiny case and a spotted mushroom, in plain black outline.

This sheet gathers a handful of autumn finds and lays them out on open white paper: a maple leaf, a chestnut leaf, two more leaves drawn with their veins showing, an acorn still sitting in its cap, a split spiny case from a horse chestnut, and a spotted mushroom. Nothing overlaps into a heap, so each shape keeps its own outline and can be finished on its own. We drew the group as separate objects rather than as a scene, which means there is no ground under them, no horizon and no sky to account for.

The maple leaf is the widest shape on the page. Its lobes come to points, and the notches between them cut deep enough that the outline reads as a maple before any colour goes down at all. The veins run out from the base of the leaf towards each point, splitting as they go. Those vein lines divide the leaf into narrow fields, and you can treat each field as its own small area or ignore the divisions entirely and lay one flat tone across the whole blade.

The chestnut leaf next to it is built differently. It is long, tapered and edged with small teeth, with one strong midrib and short veins branching off it at regular intervals like the ribs of a feather. The two remaining leaves are simpler in outline but carry the same vein structure, so all four give a chance to work one idea at four different widths. If the group should look like it came off a single walk, keep the vein lines a single colour across every leaf.

The acorn sits low in the arrangement, still wearing its cap. The cap is textured with the small overlapping scales that give an acorn its rough top, and the nut below it is smooth and egg shaped, narrowing to a short point at the tip. That split between rough and smooth is the whole appeal of the shape. A darker tone on the cap and a lighter one on the nut separates the two without any shading skill at all, because the outline has already done the work of dividing them.

The spiny case has cracked open. Horse chestnut cases do that as they ripen, and the drawing catches one part way through, with the two halves parted and the spines standing out around the rim. Inside, the surface is smooth where the nut sat. It is the busiest single object on this page and the one that rewards patience: the spines are drawn as separate small triangles, and outlining them in a slightly darker tone than the shell before filling the body gives the case a proper burr edge.

The mushroom is drawn with a domed cap, a ring of spots across it and a stout stem underneath. The spots are outlined rather than filled, so they stay white unless you decide otherwise, and leaving them as bare paper against a strong cap colour is the quickest way to make the mushroom read from across a room. The stem widens slightly at the base where it meets nothing in particular, since there is no ground line here, and that leaves the object sitting cleanly on the open paper.

Autumn is a long season with a lot of evenings in it, and this is a sheet for one of them. It works on the table while dinner is in the oven, and it works cut apart afterward. The four leaves can be trimmed out and taped along a window frame; the acorn and the mushroom are small enough to become the front of a folded card or a name marker at a place setting. Cutting the sheet up is a fair use of it, and the objects were spaced with a scissor line in mind.

We built the file at A4 with a margin on all four sides, so a home printer will not clip the spines or the leaf tips. The lines are solid black on white with no grey fill anywhere, which prints the same on a draft setting as it does on a high quality one. Plain printer paper is fine for pencils. If markers are the plan, heavier card keeps the ink from soaking through onto whatever is under the page, and it also holds a fold if the sheet becomes a card.

Published 28 August 2026Updated 28 August 2026728 words