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My daughter is six and brutal. She walked past my fancy store-bought ghost garland last fall and asked if it was for grown-ups. Then she stopped dead in front of a printed bat poster taped above her bookshelf and said it was the best thing in the house. Six year olds know.
So this whole list is the kid wall I built her, plus the spillover that crept down the hallway and onto the kitchen window. None of it came in a box. It started as files I pulled from an indie design shop, ran through the printer at 110 lb when I had it, copy paper when I did not, and stuck up with painter’s tape so the paint would survive. Some of it she colored herself. Some of it I laminated so the colored ones would survive her.
A few of these links are affiliate links, which means if you grab a file I might get a tiny cut. Costs you the same. Here is what made the wall.
The bundle that turned into a whole afternoon
I bought this one for the cutting machine and then realized half the shapes printed flat just fine. There are a stack of designs in here, bats and a witch and a moon scene, and on a rainy Sunday in September I just printed the lot on regular paper and let my nephew cut them out with safety scissors.
The ones I actually wanted on the wall I redid on heavier stock and they hold a shape standing up against a lamp. He taped his paper versions in a row down the stairs and they are still there.
One thing. It is a bundle, so the files are not all sized the same. I had to fit-to-page on three of them or they printed huge. Two minutes of fiddling, not a dealbreaker.
A single cut-out that earns the frame
This is one design, clean lines, the kind of thing that looks like more work than it was. I slid it into a 5×7 frame my sister left at my place two moves ago and put it on the kitchen windowsill where the morning light hits it.
Printed black on white it reads almost like a paper cut from a craft fair. My partner thought I paid for it framed.
Nitpick: the lines are thin, so a low-ink cartridge makes it look grey and sad. I caught mine on the second print and swapped the cartridge. Print it when your black is actually black.
The matching piece I hung beside the first
I grabbed this as a companion to the other single cut-out and they look like a set on the wall even though they are two separate files. Same shop, same vibe, slightly different scene. I framed both and leaned them on the bookshelf instead of nailing anything.
My daughter calls them the twins. They are not twins. I did not correct her.
The only snag was sizing them to match. One came out a hair bigger, so I scaled it to 90 percent in the print menu and now they line up. If you want a pair, print them in the same session so you can eyeball it.
A bare spooky tree for the hallway dead spot
Every house has that one stretch of wall that does nothing. Mine is the hallway to the bathroom. This bare twisty tree went up there at poster size and suddenly the hallway had a personality.
I printed it across two sheets because my printer maxes at letter, taped the seam on the back, and at arm’s length you cannot see the join. My kid added paper bats to the branches with a glue stick.
The nitpick here is the seam, honestly. If you have access to a larger printer at a copy shop, do that instead. Mine cost me a dollar fifty for one big sheet and looked cleaner than my taped version.
Little costumed kids that made the playroom
This is a set of clip art, tiny trick-or-treaters in costumes, and it is pure kid-room fuel. I printed eight of the characters, cut them into a garland, and strung them across the playroom window on baker’s twine.
The pumpkin-costume one is my daughter’s favorite and she insisted it go in the middle. So it went in the middle.
Because these are individual graphics you do the layout yourself, which is either fun or annoying depending on your evening. I dropped them into a free slideshow app, four to a page, and printed that. Took ten minutes once I stopped overthinking it.
Folksy brushstroke prints for the grown-up corner
Not everything on a kid wall has to be cartoons. These have a hand-painted folk look, loose brushstrokes, muted oranges and a deep plum instead of neon. I put two of them above the reading nook where the bedtime books live.
They read older and calmer, which my partner appreciated because he was tired of cackling cartoon pumpkins by mid-October.
One note. The PNG files have a transparent background, so if you print on white paper you get white behind the art, not a colored block. I wanted the plum to fill the page, so I dropped a colored rectangle behind it in the app first. Five seconds of extra work.
Classroom-friendly art for the homework wall
My daughter has a little desk where she does her reading practice, and I wanted the Halloween decor up there to feel like school, not a haunted house. This set is exactly that. Friendly ghosts, a cute spider, the kind of thing a teacher would tape to a bulletin board.
I printed a few, laminated them with the cheap pouch laminator I bought during a different craft phase, and stuck them up with tape. Laminating means she can wipe marker off them.
The nitpick is the colors run a touch bright on my printer. If you want them softer, knock the saturation down a notch before printing. I left mine loud. She likes loud.
Simple line drawings she could color herself
This was the smartest thing I printed all season. Plain black outlines, no fill, basically built to be colored in. I ran off a dozen on copy paper and left them on the kitchen table with a tin of markers on a quiet weeknight.
Three kids from the street ended up at my table. We taped the finished ones along the front hall and every single one is different.
The only catch is copy paper buckles if they use wet markers, which they will. Next time I will print on slightly heavier stock for the coloring ones. Crayons were totally fine, for what it is worth.
Doodle frames for the kid art you cannot throw away
My fridge is a graveyard of drawings I am not allowed to recycle. This bundle is a bunch of doodly Halloween frames, and I started printing them to actually frame her drawings instead of just magneting them up.
I print the frame, she draws a ghost in the middle, and it goes on the wall looking semi-official. We did a whole row of them down the side of the fridge.
The bundle has more frame styles than I will ever use, which is fine, but scroll the previews before you print so you grab the one you want. I printed a fussy lacy one by accident and it ate way too much black ink for a kid scribble.
Spooky barnyard prints for the kitchen run
We did a little farmhouse-Halloween thing along the top of the kitchen cabinets last year, mostly because my mother-in-law was visiting and I panicked. These farm animals in tiny Halloween getups did the job. A cow in a witch hat is undefeated.
I printed four, propped them against the backsplash on little easel stands, and my partner kept rearranging them because he has opinions about the chicken.
The printed orange came out more pumpkin than the screen showed, which actually worked against the wood cabinets. If your kitchen leans cool-toned, do a test page first so the warm orange does not fight your walls.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you wear a halloween mask in public?
Mostly yes, on Halloween and at parties nobody blinks. The thing to know is some towns have old local rules about full-face masks, and a lot of stores ask you to lower it at the door for the cameras.
For little kids I skip the mask anyway and lean on printed costume art and face paint instead. They can actually see where they are walking, and I am not chasing a dropped mask down the sidewalk.
What is vintage halloween?
It is the look from the old postcard-and-tin-noisemaker era, roughly the 1920s through the 1950s. Muted orange and black, slightly creepy smiling pumpkins, witches that look hand-drawn rather than slick.
A lot of the folk-art and brushstroke files lean that direction. If you want that aged feel at home, print on a warm cream paper instead of bright white and it reads older instantly.
Can I print these at home?
Yes, that is the whole point of how I use them. Everything on this list went through my home inkjet at some stage, the small ones in one pass and the poster-sized tree split across two sheets.
If you want a piece bigger than letter size in one clean sheet, a copy shop will do it for a dollar or two. I do that only for the big focal pieces and print the rest in my kitchen.
What file formats do these designs come in?
It is a mix. The line-art and cut bundles tend to be SVG, which the cutting machine reads but which also prints fine straight from a viewer. The painterly and clip-art sets come as PNG with a transparent background.
The transparent part trips people up. If you print a PNG on white paper you get white behind the art, so if you want a colored block you add it yourself in whatever app you are printing from.
Before You Print
She still asks if we can put the bats up. It is June. I keep saying after summer and she keeps asking, which tells me the wall worked better than any plastic decoration I have ever hung.
Start with the line-art set and a tin of markers if you only grab one thing. Hand a kid a black outline and a marker on a slow afternoon and watch what ends up taped to your hallway.