Gothic Coloring Pages

Gothic without the gore

Gothic has a reputation problem. Say the word and most people picture something gory, and gore is exactly what the tradition is not about. The gothic novel, when it appeared in the eighteenth century, was about atmosphere and dread - a house, a locked wing, weather, and the growing sense that something is wrong that nobody will name. Nothing in it is graphic. That restraint is the whole effect, and it is what these pages are drawn for.

The poisonous garden

Several pages here are botanical, and every plant on them will hurt you: nightshade, datura, thorn and berry, foxglove. This is a real tradition - the poison garden at Alnwick is a working example and it is locked. What makes these plants gothic is not that they are deadly but that they are beautiful first and deadly second, and you have to already know in order to be careful. Nightshade in particular has flowers people describe as delicate and a berry that looks like a small cherry.

Memento mori is not morbid

A skull in a still life, a guttering candle, a watch left open. These images were commissions for wealthy people who wanted to be reminded that money does not exempt anyone. They were optimistic objects in their own time - the point was to notice the day you are in, not to dread the last one. Coloring one slowly is closer to the original use than looking at one in a museum.

Ivy over iron

Of all the gothic images, this one is the most quietly unsettling and the least dramatic. A wrought railing being taken apart, very slowly, by a plant. It works because nothing in the picture is violent and the outcome is not in doubt. Most real gothic effects are like this: a process you can see the end of.

The gargoyle's actual job

Gargoyles are drainpipes. The grotesque face exists because water had to be thrown clear of the stonework, and the carvers made the spout into a creature. The demons on cathedrals are mostly plumbing. Knowing that does not make them less good to look at, and it is worth knowing while you color one.

How to color dark art without it turning to mud

• Do not reach for black. Build your darks out of two or three deep colors layered - a blue-violet under a deep red-brown reads darker and stays alive.
• Leave the paper white somewhere. One untouched highlight anchors everything else; a page colored edge to edge in dark tones goes flat no matter how carefully it is done.
• Candlelight is warm and it falls off fast. Warm and pale right at the flame, cool and deep three inches away, nothing in between - that contrast is the whole trick.
• Save the darkest value for last. It is easy to go darker and impossible to go back.

Where the word came from

Gothic began as an insult. Renaissance writers used it for medieval architecture they thought barbaric - the work of Goths - and the name stuck to the pointed arches and the vaulting long after the sneer wore off. The literary sense arrives in 1764 with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, which he set in a medieval castle and subtitled "A Gothic Story". Everything since - the moors, the locked wing, the family secret - descends from one antiquarian having a strange dream and writing it down.

Mourning had a whole visual language

Victorian mourning was codified to a degree that is hard to imagine now: how long you wore black, when you could add grey, which jewellery was permitted. Jet was mined at Whitby specifically for it. Hair from the dead was woven into brooches - not as a horror but as the most personal thing available before photography was cheap. Several motifs on these pages come out of that vocabulary: the weeping willow, the broken column, the urn with cloth over it. They were designed to be read at a glance by everyone who saw them.

Why candles keep turning up

A candle is the one light source that visibly consumes itself while you use it, which makes it the most useful object in the whole gothic toolkit. It measures time, it makes shadows move, and it will go out. Every still life with a guttering candle is making the same argument as the skull next to it, only more politely.

The cabinet of curiosities

Before museums there were wunderkammern - private rooms where a wealthy collector kept coral, a narwhal tusk sold as a unicorn horn, coins, beetles, an automaton, a piece of a saint. They were not organised by anything except the owner's sense of wonder. The page here called The Cabinet of Curiosities is drawn in that spirit, and it is the densest sheet in this set: a good one to keep on the table over several evenings rather than finish in a sitting.